Costume and Props

Actor/Model profile

What I have learnt:
Fom doing this piece I am now able to give the characters more of a background than just two people in the gym and two people on the running track. By giving the charcters more of a background the advert itself will make more sense as you can now understand why Glen is in the gym and why Tom is out on the track rather than just random coinsidence.

Script: Ancillary Task

By doing this script it has saved me time and also made our radio advert a lot better because we had a script that we could read of rather than making up our script as we went along which would have made the advert not a smooth as well as waste time in the radio studio which we couldn't afford as it is being used frequently and we only had a small half an hour slot so by writing a script we could just go in set up and then record the advert without wasting any time.

StoryBoard for first advert

We made a story board so that when we did our filming we both had a idea in our minds to what shots we wanted to get and how we wanted to set our advert out. This helped us to save time when filming. We made a short film to show the shots and planning of our first advert.

Story board gym from Rob Bone on Vimeo.

Shooting Schedule

By doing a shooting schedule I have been able to keep track of the time I had to film and by planning shoots it meant if something was wrong we had time to go out and film it again such as when we forgot the shaker for the ancillary task we didnt panic we just filmed the last 5 secocnds the next day.

Institutional Research

In this piece of research I will be looking a the institution WCRS. By doing this I can find out about the company and how they make adverts. In our course we will be playing the role of this company in that we have to make the advert so by learning what they do to make a successful advert i'm hoping it can help me make mine. I will be looking into what types of adverts they make and how they are funded

Above is one of the most famous adverts they have done. It was an advert about the launch of Sky's new channel "Sky Atlantic".

What I learnt:
From doing this piece of research I have learn't that making an advert is a very professional business. Adverts can be made by a professional company such as WCRS and they have to make the requirements of what the company like sky need. Therefore when making our advert we will try to make it look as professional as we can, making sure that we have a clear message in both of our adverts and that they are similar enough that when people view them on television they know it is our advert.

 

Regulation Research

I am going to do a piece of regulation research about the company OFCOM. By doing this I will learn what content I am allowed to show in my advert to make sure that it can be legally put on TV. I will also be hoping to find out a bit of background information about the company, seeing if there is anything else they do.

Audience Research

I am going to do some audience research for my advert. By doing audience research it will allow me to see what our target audience like to see when they watch adverts, what adverts stick and adverts that they dislike. We will also try to find out what channel they watch the most and this will give us a better idea of what type of programme to sponsor in our opening sequence as our ancillary task.

We set about doing audience research by making a questionnaire. We then found people around our college that have an interest in sports or going to the gym, as this is the type of person that our advert is going to be aimed at. This would give us the best idea when it came to making our adverts because we could make one that suited our target audience. A copy of a blank questonnaire is above.  

Once we had all of our questionnaires filled in, we looked at the results and tried to find out popular channels and their favorite advert, hopefully by doing this we can evaluate the type of advert that people enjoyed to see if they were funny adverts or if they were more serious and set our advert around what we have seen. Below is a filled in questionnaire and a table of some of the results.

What I learnt: from doing this piece of research I have been able to find out what my specific target audience are looking for in adverts by looking at their favourite adverts are. we can then try to base our adverts on what appeals to them for example if comical advert are popular we could try to make ours comical although it might not work for a protein shake as its not as conventional for them to include humour.

Audiece targeting

I have decided to do a piece of audience targeting so that when I have to make my advert I can try to make it as specific as I can to a certain type of person. by doing this it allows me to make choicessuch as who to have as actors in our advert and also using correct costume, mise en scene and the right music so that it appeals to them.

 

What I Learnt:

From doing this piece of audience targeting I have given myself an idea the type of person that I am going to aim my advert towards. We are going to aim for mostly males around the age of 18 to about mid thirties. The person will be interested in getting the best out of their body and have a healthy active lifestyle.

Textual analysis: Ancillary task, moving Image

Why I did this:

I have analysed this ancillary task so that I have an idea on how to fit in advertising around a programme, so that when I  make mine I can use some of the techniques that I have found out.  In this case ford have advertised their cars to fit in to football which is the programme that is going to be shown following the sequence. From doing this I have learnt that it is good to use cut a ways and to try and show your product in as many different settings as you can whilst linking it to the programme that you are advertising on. The cutting has to be fast to allow this as you only have around a 30 second time period to show your product.

Textual Analysis: Main Task

History and Development

The First Advert:

The first television advert was broadcast in the USA on July the 1^st 1941; the advert cost $9 and was on New York station WNBT before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies.   The first ever advert was for a watch company called bulova. The first British advert was
shown on ITV on the 25^th of September 1955. The advert was for Gibbs toothpaste.

The Gibbs toothpaste advert shows the toothpaste with a toothbrush frozen by a river. The advert then cuts away to show the toothpaste being applied to the toothbrush and this is followed by a lady brushing her teeth using the new toothpaste.

Looking at the cinematography in the advert I can see that they use lots of pans, especially at the start where they pan to show the flow of the river which leads to the piece of ice with the product inside. They then use a zoom to show the toothpaste up close.  The editing in the advert was slow with the first shot lasting 7 seconds and comparing this to more modern adverts it is a very long shot length. The mise-en-scene in the film shows and icey night with a river flowing through it. I think that they have used this mise-en-scene of a cold, frosty lake to create the sense that the toothpaste is cool and refreshing when applying. The snow in the advert is used to represent how white your teeth can be if you use this toothpaste. Later in the advert it shows a woman brushing her teeth, the mise-en-scene is very plain in this part of the advert with a pale background. Also the use the the medium-close up would suggest that the focus for this part of the advert is to focus on the woman brushing her teeth, perhaps as a demo on how to brush your teeth properly.  The sound in the video first of all starts with the noise of the flowing river with soft music coming from a flute, this relaxing scene could help engage the viewer. There is more sound however throughout the video, mostly in the form of a voice over. the voice over has been used to tell the viewer about the toothpaste and things that would not be clear without it, for example what the chemicals in the bottle does and how it improves your gums.
 

Todays Advert:


This is a recent advert for buidweiser beer in which they group of boys have installed rubber flooring and are able to bounce things (the beer) to eachother. The fact that this would very rarley if ever happen add a slighlty comical side to the advert and that is something that the Gibbs toothpaste advert didnt have and this is one way in which advert have changed.

However the style used in the advert is not the only thing that has changed. They also use much faster paced editing. This is evident with the opening shot in the budweiser advert lasting just  2.5 seconds compared to the Gibbs advert which lasted 7 seconds. The mise en scene hasnt really changed too much in the sense that they are both quite realistic settings however they have added unrealistic item in the adverts to highlight the product for example in the Biggs advert they have put the toothpaste in a square block of ice so it stands out, and in the budweiser advert they have used the rubber floors to show the beers being bounced to eachother which can give the effect that if you drink this beer you will have "style" like the people in advert which is put across in the casual way they catch the beers.
I also think that they way in which advertisers go about advertising. In the Gibbs advert they use the voice over to show off the name gibbs toothpaste and is reapeated several times throughout the advert. However in the budweiser advert they dont have a voice over until the very end of the advert to just describe the beer as clean, crisp, refreshing budweiser rather than repeating budweiser several times. They also show a budweiser in the background getting the "head" chopped off it and they have used this to make the audiece desire a beer that is clean, crisp and refreshing linking the voice over to the pictures to add effect.




What I learn't:

I think that looking at the two advert I feel that the budweiser advert is a much better advert and I would expect this as it has had years of adverts to create this. I think that I will have to try and use some of the techniques that they have used. I will try to make sure that the editing is at a fast pace and that I dont use long shots that will bore an audience. I will also try to add some humour to my advert if possible because I believe that it will help an audience to remember an advert and the product, however this will be hard to do because if it is only funny to a small audience then it would not be a success. I think that the mise - en - scene in the advert will have to be realistic without anything being in the background that you wouldnt expect to find. I think that in our advert we will try to make the sound clear and loud like in the budweiser adverts with the sounds of the beer bouncing and then being caught is loud and clear. I will also have to try to make my advert compatable because in this day in age adverts pop up in different places such as on the internet if you are shopping, on the radio and also on public places such as bus stops, I think that taking this into consideration we could try to make some stills to add to the video TV advert to show that we could put it on a website or bus.

Preliminary Task: Documentary

The third task that we had to make was a documentary and this was open as we could make the documentary on any problem in school. We chose to use the school food prices as our problem as it was something that we thought was interesting and also a topic in which we could get good discussion.



After watching the finished documentary I think that if I was going to make one for my final piece I would have to make sure that we have two opinions and that they argued against eachother. I also think that we would have to film our interviews better as there is a lot of background that is not needed and this would mean that our marks will drop. I also think that our cutaways could be more interesting and match what the interviewe is saying.

Preliminary Task: Music Video

Here is the music videot that we created, we had to make the video to the song candy by madona. In the song she talks about candy however we believe that the word candy is used to replace the word sex and therefore we found the video quite a challenge to show this however with our "dirty" dancing in the video I think that we have managed to do this.



From making our music video I have learnt that if you are going to make a music video it has to be fast paced almost as fast as the music. We also found that you had to try to represent the song with the actions that are taking place in the video. In our video I think that we could have used better settings but again we only had a week to complete the task in school and I thought that we did well for the time and facilities that we had been given.

Preliminary Task: Advert

Before we started our year 13 coursework we did some preliminary tasks to help us too enhance our skills in the specific genres of Advert, Mucis Videos and Documentary. We had to pick a product out of a box and had no choice of what the product was going to be. We pulled out a milk bottle and this is what we came up with.

 

From making this advert I have learnt that it is very important to use music and sound in your piece as after watching the advert several times I have realised that it starts to lack interest. Another thing that I have noticed is the setting and background in the piece, for example when the main charcter is drinking the milk there are blinds behind him and this raised questons also when he walks into the gym there are bags including the camera bag and in our advert we would have to make sure that these are not there. However only having a week to create the video I dont think that it was too bad.