How has my creativity developed through using digital technology?

The coursework module proved to be a difficult task at times, with a learning curve that was on occasion extremely steep. However, all stages of the production of our two creative pieces offered many chances for my creativity to develop. One particular aspect that allowed my creativity to flourish was the prevalence of digital technology during all stages of the creation of the products.
During the pre-production stage, we sought to inform the creative process through researching existing media products. An example of this research included the viewing of a number of opening sequences from films on YouTube and DVDs. The opening sequences we watched included ‘Goodfellas’, ‘Snatch’, ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘Scream’ (as well as a number of others). ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’ provided us with interesting scenes and shots involving the boot of a car, ‘Scream’ offered us an insight into one particular way of creating a suburban horror and ‘Snatch’ presented us with a generally well-made opening and a generated a certain degree of inspiration. By studying existing examples of well-established opening sequences, the group was able to better understand the codes and conventions of the genre we intended to work within, as well as noting effective techniques and styles utilised by professionals which we could carry over to be used in our own production.
Access to the internet proved to be a great asset during the pre-production, with much of our inspiration coming from pre-existing materials. This demonstrated what a great advantage there is to living within an age when vast reams of information are easily accessible.
During the actual production stage of the creation of our product, we filmed our product digitally using a DV Camera. As these were handheld and significantly lighter than traditional stock cameras, they allowed us greater manoeuvrability and enabled shots to be captured from awkward angles, such as the shot we used in ‘Roadkill’ of the underside of the car.
The post-production stage also saw digital technology playing a key role, as we edited our piece digitally using the Windows Movie Maker program. This program offered more examples of our creativity being stifled by the limitations of the program than opportunities for our creativity for flourish. A key limitation was the issue around Roadkill’s title slide, with the limitations of Windows Movie Maker forcing us to use Photoshop to find an appropriate font then insert the font as an image into the edit. However, this issue meant we had to think outside of the box to find a solution; so to some degree, these limitations did aid the development of our creativity.
Copyrighting issues did prevent us from seeking out more obvious choices of music for our production. However, the wide availability of music CDs allowed us to access a suitable soundtrack for our piece (after a rather long-winded hunt through the available archives). The songs could then be easily ripped from the CD to a PC, with the files then being easily importable to our production during the editing stage. This allowed for easy inter-changeability between tracks, allowing us to test out multiple solutions to our soundtrack problem.
Our distribution of our product was done entirely through digital technology, with YouTube being our medium of choice, as it allows potential access to millions of users and is a far more effective form of distribution for low-budget film than a hard-copy release. A key lesson revolving around the use of YouTube was the down-scaling of video quality when a video is uploaded to YouTube, a lesson which we unfortunately didn’t fully notice until after the final distribution of our product. This issue crippled our product, both visually and in terms of professionalism, as our fonts became unreadable due to the pixel distortion. However, I have been able to learn from this mistake and will as such use clearer fonts which are less prone to becoming unreadable during the A2 coursework module.