Digital Technology.

Adobe Photoshop
The image manipulation program (Photoshop) allowed me to manipulated my magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread for my AS coursework and my magazine advert and digipak, as well as the still shots used in the music video for my A2 coursework. I relied heavily on the magic lasso tool to gain the important pieces from a photo that I wanted to change or use. The colour variations were also used a lot to make my images more brighter and eye catching, as well as to make certain elements stand out against the rest of the image.

To gain the same colours for my text in AS I used the eyedropper tool to make sure that all my colours linked in with one another and I didn't have varying shades of a certain colour, which would have made my magazine look unprofessional. The shape tool was also useful for my AS coursework as it allowed me to create shapes that would attract my target audiences attention. I lightened all of the photos I used for both my AS and A2 coursework pieces because it made them look more inviting and colourful, I also changed the contrast for some of my images to make the photos look slightly surreal or more attractive. The use of layers was especially important for my front page of my magazine as I had to make sure that all of my information could be seen and look inviting.


Desk Top Publishing
My double page spread was quite simple, only using an image for the background with text over the top. As my background was black and white I had to create semi-transparent text boxes so that my text could be seen and therefore easily read. I had to make sure that the image I used for my background didn't have the artist I used in the middle of the page as otherwise they'd be unable to be seen as they'd be in the join of the magazine and therefore I couldn't have any of my text in the middle of the page either so that it could still be read. I made sure that the layout was the same throughout my coursework by making duplicate copies of some of my work so if I wanted to change something I would still have the original design to look back on and use as a reference. For my texts I used fonts off a website that gave me more choice than the software I was using to edit my work on, meaning I could find text that I thought worked well with my genre and look. By only using three fonts it also meant that my work didn't look too busy, as well as linking all my pages together to have a similar look.

Weblogs
The blogs we had for our coursework were useful to gain audience feedback from, as our audience could look at our designs/work which we had uploaded onto the blog and then comment directly on that post with their opinions and suggestions. The software we used to edit our film footage is iMovie, which was easy to use and introduced us to the speed effects, as well as the audio editing that we could do to both the song and the audio on the visuals. For my AS images needed for my magazine, I used a Nikon D40 and a Samsung ES15 and uploaded my images using a USB lead. For the music video because we edited our footage on iMovie it allowed our knowledge of layering to develop through practise. Some of the edits we used for our footage were: cutting, speed up, slow motion, increase length, colour variations and the crop tool. We made sure our work was precise by getting other people to check our work to see if everything came together correctly and by looking through our storyboard to see if our footage was correctly placed. We ensured that our audio matched our visuals by watching the video repeatedly and by getting others to watch it to make sure that the lip syncing was correct. We used a lot of slow motion or speeding up for our visuals, but they were the only effects.