Ms Robertson

Creativity

1) Do you think you were creative or not throughout your coursework?

(AS) I believe creativity was definitely used throughout all the coursework. With each piece we did we created a completely new and original idea that we hadn’t previously seen. In our student magazine we were very creative in terms of coming up with ideas to draw the audience in which worked especially well with our title and style. We used an acronym but also a word that everyone knows and uses “SPAM”. We created a style of using popular recognised computer associated items such as an action box, mouse, email options ect.

I don’t think we were as creative with our photos as we could have been as most of them we just shot them without thinking much about surroundings, mise en scene and angles. We hardly did much editing to them and so most pictures remained as the original. We were extremely creative in the way that we stuck to the typical convention of having a editors letter on the contents page, however we presented it in a different way and carried on our computer recognised items by using a start up screen command prompt and wrote our editor letter inside it with computer type font. These ideas were creative because we wanted to be able to present a more modern style of magazine that could apply to both genders and computers are very modern and used by nearly all teens. Our brand name was furthermore creative as it was funny and appealing to teenagers yet cleverly had more significance to it.

In our music magazine we used rock style fonts to fit in with our rock/indie magazine. We were creative in terms of what the magazine represented as we came up with a brand new original idea of a magazine that was for unsigned unknown bands which has never previously been done. We were creative in our music magazine as the language we used was very modern and we also used slang to make the audience and readers feel comfortable and as if there talking to someone like them. We were extremely creative in terms of contents and appealing to a social group. We selected carefully what to place in our magazine so that it attracted the right people.

2) Did technology enhance your creativity or not?

(AS)Yes technology did enhance our creativity as we wouldn’t have been able to achieve many things we wanted to.

Web 2.0 allowed us to look at existing magazines to gain an insight into what attracts people and what people look for in a magazine. It allowed us to start thinking of ideas for ours whilst taking inspiration from them. From the web I was also able to use facebook to ask friends opinions on ideas and any suggestions to help improve them so it made our ideas more creative and better. The web also allowed us to go on many font sights to find the right fonts that we needed to suit our house style. In our Preliminary task, the technology was extremely important as the technology available gave us the ability to translate paper ideas to real images. The tools on the macs allowed us to be more creative in terms of what we wanted to do and create. We were able to further our ideas and make them more stylistic such as on our contents page with the buttons and section titles, we were able to make them 3d and look more professional. The technology of a graphics tablet also came in useful as were able to use it to create images or fine tune and edit photos in great detail and allowed us to be more creative by getting deeper into pictures. Photoshop allowed us to be very creative as I could use many different tools to create different effects or allow me to achieve things that wouldn’t have been possible without the technology. For instance our original picture on one of the covers had a guy in the back (who wasn’t meant to be there) I could use the rubber tool to get rid of him and then use the clone tool to replicate the tree and barrier that was behind to retouch and make the picture have a full background. The magnetic lasso also helped me to be creative as I could cut out parts of pictures easily and quickly and place them with other pictures. The tool allowed me to remove and take parts of pictures with it still looking the same and not having to roughly cut around it. Having this technology allowed us to be creative as we could manipulate photos. In our main task Photoshop allowed us to be extremely creative with our contents page as we could layer images and items and change opacity and create something completely different that we wouldn’t have been able to achieve if we didn’t have these options and ability to manipulate the pictures. Technology also allowed us to use cameras and phones to film our photo shoot and take photos for the magazine. Portable lights allowed us to get lighting effects in areas to emphasise the people’s features and be creative in how we portrayed them. Technology allowed us to be creative as we originally had our wire on our music magazine flat. But being able to use a graphics tablet allowed us to add extra defining detail and turn the flat wire into a 3d wire. Pages allowed us to put our entire final piece together and create our actual magazine.

(A2) Technology definitely enhanced our creativity in our A2 product. Being able to use iMovie allowed us to edit scenes and take parts from certain footage and parts from others. It also allowed us to add in the music track and also take music from YouTube and place strip the noise and add this to one of our scenes. We were able to crop the footage to specific lengths and be creative as we could mess around with the scenes and change and adapt them to get them how we wanted. iMovie also gave us the ability to be even more creative as one of our scenes was an interview scene which we shot from a high angle in a corner as if it was a security camera. iMovie allowed us to place a filter in to make it partially grainy as if a real camera and add text in the bottom corner like security cameras do with the date and time. This was creative as it gave the illusion of a security camera just from a filter and text added to an original basic shot scene.

3) What ideas did you communicate and what stylistic techniques did you use? How did it relate to your interests/self identity?

4) Was your product influenced by your environment?

Our student magazine at AS was influenced by our environment but it was a positive influence. Because we were at sixth form this gave us an advantage to take photos in a natural surrounding and actually get feedback on contents of a student magazine as we could ask actual students what they’d like to read about. Being at school helped influence colours and pictures and allowed us to gain a realistic insight into school life and what to put in the magazine. When we moved onto our main task at A2 it was definitely influence by the environment. We originally wanted it to be quite summer but as it was winter we had grey skies and freezing cold weather. Although this influence our product it actually made it more effective as it gave it an authentic look whilst the main guy was singing as you could see the breath in the air and the grey dull skies gave the portrayal of sadness and glumness which added to the narrative that the guy had to steal to survive and wasn’t what he wants to do but it helps him survive, so the environment added to atmosphere which helps play on the audiences feelings. Furthermore the environment further influenced our product as we could only mostly shoot after school by which it got extremely dark quickly. We had to work fast when shooting our scenes. I think if we had more time without it getting dark so quickly we would have been able to have more footage to select and edit and a wider choice. Also the lip synching could have been improved if we had more time to take more shots.

5) Was it original or did you add something extra to an original media text?

6) Would you take any creative skills into future projects of have you been influenced to engage these skills in any other projects?