How has my creativity developed through using digital technology to complete my coursework production?

Improving my camera skills has helped to develop my creativity as I have learnt new skills, as well as improved the skills that I already had. For the preliminary exercise during our AS coursework, we wanted to include a panning movement as the character walked across the room, however when we filmed this we had a problem with the camera not keeping up with the character it was following. As a consequence of this, the framing went wrong, and there was unwanted sound, although the film did still make sense. Even though there were problems with the panning movement in the preliminary exercise, we still wanted to use the same movement in the main exercise. It was my role to film this part of the film for our main task, and from using the problems that occurred in the preliminary exercise, I was able to improve the panning movement. The main thing I did to improve the pan was to move the tripod with just one finger, rather than holding it with my whole hand. This meant the movement was much smoother and also stayed at a consistent speed which made it look more professional and effective once we had added in the cross cuts.

Through improving the panning movement for the main task, I was also able to greatly improve my framing skills. This is because when filming a pan it is important to get the framing right in order for the shot to be good. By making sure the framing for the pan was correct, I feel that I improved the skill of checking the rest of the framing throughout the rest of the coursework, which I think made the overall end product better because everything was how it was originally planned to be.

I also think there were problems with the lighting and continuity in the first exercise. For example, when we were editing the film, there were issues with getting the different shots to match up to each other and make sense through not making sure that the continuity would work during the filming process. In order to improve this, I made sure that when we were filming our main task, when we re-filmed a shot, or moved on to film a different shot, everything was in the same place as it was before. This meant that it was much easier to edit the film together during the editing process, and it also meant that we had a wider variety of shots to choose from. I feel that this greatly enhanced the final product of the main task, compared to the completed preliminary exercise.

Using software that I was unfamiliar with to edit both the preliminary exercise and the main task ensured that I developed a new creative skill. By having to adapt to a new piece of software and to understand how to use it in a short space of time was difficult, however I think it is a skill that I can build on and use in other situations. Even though the programme is limited in terms of some things you can do, for example the choice of credits, I feel I was still able to be part of making the end films look as good as they could with the technology available for us to use. This developed my creativity because I now feel I would be confident enough to use the software for future projects.

Another way in which my creativity has been developed through the use of digital technology is Web 2.0. Through websites that incorporate user generated content, such as YouTube, I was able to publish my work onto the internet, and then also able to evaluate it alongside my uploaded video. This meant that all of my work was electronic, and it was easy to relate it back to the actual film because it was easily available to watch.