Discuss how you have become more skilled in the use of digital technology during the production of your Foundation and Advanced portfolios.

For the pre production in AS, when researching I would just scan magazines in and make blog posts with the images, thus lacking in technical skill, and making the posts seem a little bit samey. However in A2, when researching I embedded the videos in to the post, and made both plain text posts, and PowerPoint presentations, which I then uploaded to SlideShare, and embedded into my blog. Also, in the AS year I used videos to get audience feedback. Although this format worked well, the files were too large for the college Internet to handle and I couldn’t upload them onto my blogger. I learnt from this, and in this A2 year I used a lower quality video to film the audience feedback and the evaluation, and therefore could upload it onto my blog.

During production, I used the same camera, a Samsung X5 digital SLR, for both years. In AS, I only used the camera to take pictures for the magazine. I only used it for this, and therefore didn’t require a lot of technical skill. This year, I progressed my skills to using the camera to record parts of the music video, and I also used a filter to give some clips a blue tint. Also, this year I used better programs. Last year, to create my layout I used Microsoft Publisher, which is a very simple program that is not used to creating graphics. This year, I used Photoshop to create both my advert and my digipak, which is an industry level program that allows me to make more professional looking products.

For postproduction, I developed my Photoshop skills. In AS, I only used it to edit the contrast and brightness of some of the images that I included. However, this year I progressed to using the magnetic lasso to select parts of images so that I could turn them red, and using colour replace to change the black cards on my advert image to red. This requires considerably more skill than the first year. For the evaluation of my AS year, I put it all into a slideshow, which I uploaded to my blog using Slide Serve. This made it shorter than it should have been, as I tried to fit one question per slide. Also, I didn’t include any images, except for at the start. For the A2 evaluation, I use a blog post, a prezi, a slideshow hosted by Slide Share, and a vlog, which added more technical skill to my blog, let me go into more depth, and gave more variety to my posts, meaning that it wasn’t boring to read.