Friday 10 July 2015

Evaluation of final Tv advertisements

Is the advert fit for purpose

The brief was to make re brand the Flake chocolate by creating a new advert which would both keep the original audience and also add a newer, younger audience to the list of potential target audiences. The advert has to be exactly 30 seconds, no more no less, and select which times it should come on and on what channel/channels. I also would need to research the background of the chocolate bar and the company and on the competition and the similar chocolate bars.
 I think that the advert met the brief, as it brought in both a newer generation feel to it and still kept the idea of having someone still eating the flake that most of the other flake adverts have as well. The advert also is exactly 30 seconds long and I researched the 3 different chocolate bars similar to flake.
 The re branding that we have done will attract a new audience as the product will be shown in a new light, and having the advert look cool and fresh and having ideas like the challenge and using social media, which most teenagers both have and use, will get them to want to try even more

Clarity of communication

I think that I pitched my ideas well but it could have been better. I pitched my ideas for chocolate advert to my teachers and they seemed to enjoy it, I felt that I didn't really get to speak as much as I had hoped to, as I ended up getting a bit of stage fright which caused me to stop and forget what I was talking about and causing me to look at the screen to remember which is something I didn't really want to do. For example at 10 seconds into the second part of the pitch right here, I pointed toward the board and that's something I planned not to do. I know that I didn't do as well as I could have because I, knew that I might mess up before hand as I know I always panic and mess up on camera. Apart from that after a while I felt that I got a lot better and even remained calm and mainly towards the middle of the pitch and towards the end I ended up not speaking as much to the extent of the last words I really say is at which was around 1:48 of the 3rd part.

Appropriateness to audience compared with original intentions

The chocolate advert should appeal to its target audience which was teenagers 14 - 18, of both genders but the old adverts such as this one, try to make the target audience older women. The reason this was chosen is because that is age that most people we surveyed said ate the chocolate bar. Using the target audience we could decide what props and costumes we should use. For example we had the presenter wearing normal clothes to make himself out to be a normal person which made him more appealing to talk to and to make him look more approachable. This can connote, to the audience that the flake bar is for everyone as a posed to being more for older women which would be good as that's what we were aiming for, so that we could widen the profits made from the chocolate. 

Effectiveness of techniques

In terms of shots I think we used a lot of different types of shots. Mainly we used long shots as they could show the audience the location of were the advert is being filmed. This can help because that could allow the audience to be able to become more excited seeing a location that they went too. We also used an establishing shot at 0:00. This was mainly to again show the audience where the advert was being filmed. Mid shots and two shots were used a lot to make the audience focus more on the presenter/ Contestant such as at 0:10 of the advert. The editing was straight as we thought there was no need to add any fades or anything over the top as this would make the advert look more like it was done by teenagers. At 0:18 though we have a graphic of 4 other contenders doing the challenge which which was the intent as the advert was meant to get people to try and tweet the video and hope that they would be on the advert in the next week over's video. This impacted the final product by making the advert look even more like the viewer might get in as the 4 videos more a lot and wobble, which makes them look like a fan made them.

Effectiveness of content

In the advert, The presenter goes round looking for people to try the #Don'tFlakeItChallenge which is where a person tries to eat a flake without it breaking apart which is meant to be a challenge as Flakes tend to break quite easily and are hard to eat without making a mess. Because of that we decided to base the challenge on that. The way that this advert would engage the audience is because they get to watch other people try something that they could be doing as well and seeing people they don't know doing the challenge might inspire them to do it as well. This can be seen at 0:18 of the advert where we explain what and how to enter to try doing the challenge. This can effectively engage the audience as this can be something that they can try to achieve and tell their friends about as to look out for, which allows them to then be able to tell everyone they know causing the advert and the challenge to become bigger because of word of mouth.

Effectiveness of conventions

The generic conventions used in my advert are Music, Graphics, voice overs, key character and a slogan. I chose to use music because it would help the advert to be more interesting as if the advert did not have any music it would not be very appealing to  watch as there would either be no sound or the sounds of people talking/shouting, the wind and any music going on in the background which could also get me into trouble with copyright and such. I used graphics as they were useful to the advert as they allowed me to have 4 videos being played at once,  which saved a lot of time as they needed to meet the 30 second time limit. We used a voice over because it was a more entertaining method of telling the audience how they could enter to try and be on the advert next week. We used a key character which was the presenter because it could be a character that could be someone that they could look out for on the street and also so that they could notice him in the adverts and automatically know who he is. Lastly I used a slogan which was the hashtag #Don'tFlakeItChallenge, this was really good to use as at this day and age, twitter is really popular and this hashtag would remind people of the Als challenge and the hashtag being #Alschallenge, having this would remind people about how fun that was and cause them to try this so they can have the fun they had before.
I intended for all of the conventions used to have the affect of making people remember these things from other places in the past, such as the als ice bucket challenge (Video) which happened in the summer of 2014 which most people did, this would cause them to remember that and then try this new one because of the memories of doing the ice bucket challenge. The impact that happened wasn't intended as it was more of its own challenge and when talking to people who did the ice bucket challenge, they didn't seem to mention the ice bucket challenge at all.

Impact of work

Homer Simpson doing the ice bucket challenge
I think that the advert portrays a mixed message, being both positive and negative. I think its negative as it shows viewers who might be impressionable children a way of eating which might not be considered right as they way the chocolate was eaten it didn't look neat or clean and came off when re watching as kinda untidy. Apart from that I think that the challenge would cause people go out and buy the bar so they can try themselves and be on TV. The reason I think this is because looking back at the Ice bucket challenge, people seem to do things if someone else peer pressures' them into doing it meaning one person might nominated and then they nominate someone else and it keeps going on. For an example a youtuber, named Joel (TerasHD) did the ice bucket challenge and he nominated another youtuber, called Jessica (Aphmau) to do it and she nominated other people and they did the same thing. This causes many different people to end up doing the challenge and helps to spread the ideas along. Having this advert could allow both old and newer audiences to relate to it as since the it has only been around a year since the ice bucket challenge came out, its still sort of in people's minds and because its the summer and nice and hot, people are going to recall doing it and might want to find something fun to do and this might make people do it again.

Technical Qualities

There were really no problems when actually filming the real advert but while practicing the advert out a week before, the camera was having issues so we ended up having to film the practice advert around 5 times again to make sure it was OK. The reason we re-did the fake advert was because the camera kept ended the video early so instead of filming the whole clip it would cut them down and miss about 2 seconds of footage which ruined a lot of the shots as they ended up cutting mid sentence but we ended up over coming them by switching camera to a different one and they seemed to just go away after that. The only other problem was when we had finished filming, we ended up editing together 4 different adverts, three which were featured their own contestant trying the challenge and the 4th one which was a mash up of all three. We couldn't decide which one to use, so we were going to submit all 4 but last minute we changed our minds and we ended up using the 4th one as we noticed the other 3 had different things wrong with them like the second one had no good ending and the third ones' ending being the best.

Aesthetic Qualities

I think that the advert looked realistic, which the costumes being normal clothes as that makes the audience believe that the people trying the challenge seem like normal people and that they might get stopped to do the challenge. The setting looked really good because not only was it a nice day, which was perfect for filming but also it was a iconic location so everyone would know it. The characters did really well and when I showed someone who had not known about this project, the video they were sure that they were generally the random public. The advert just generally came out really well.

Sunday 7 June 2015

Production log week 5

Week 5

31st of May to the 7th of June 2015

This week I worked with Prinul creating the advert using Final cut Express ,We actually ended up creating 4 different versions of the advert as we ended up liking some parts of each of the 3 challenges we did. The first 3 were different of each contender's attempt and they look good, but after the second one, Prinul noticed there was no really good outro for the second one. We ended up decided on using a voice over for the second one as this was the best way to have the advert. The final one was more of a compilation of the 3 videos we did and because that one looked the best and manged to have all 3 challenges in it, we decided to use that one. During the week I had actually created a couple of different Images to use including an animation that would have had the 4 extra videos going along the bottom of the screen.
4 challengers design 
I also created 5 being clock designs which changed over the week to now have the flake.

Starting Clock design
Newer clock design

This was the basic model for the clock and after a bit of work, adding the flake into the background of the clock, changing the colour of the clock's rings and hand colours to white, the clock was done but the idea ended up be scrapped.



I also created a new version of the Pack shot which would be used while Prinul was doing his outro on the advert. The changes I made to the image include removing the background colour, the flake on the right, the text in the middle and boarder. I then moved the title down to the middle and shrunk the remaining flake, and also changed the colour of the rest of the text to white so it could be seen within the video.

Logistical Challenges
A Logistical challenge i faced this week was really the second video, as it towards the end of the week we noticed that the ending for it was not very good and we decided that we should change it but there wasn't much to work with as the other outros had people in them which could leave any viewers confused on why there was a different person at the end. We over came this by using a voice over at the end over the packshot as this could mean we could have Prinul reread his lines using a voice recorder and then it could sound like he said that during the advert and give us an ending for the advert.

Technical Challenges
The biggest by far challenge for us this week was the fact that second challenge didn't actually have a very good ending that I was proud to use, so we decided that we shouldn't use it, but at that point,we were going to submit all 3 videos which we had at the time as there wasn't enough space and time in the advert to fit the 3 videos challenges.

What will be done by next Sunday?
By next week I hope to get more video entries to play during the end of the advert.

Saturday 30 May 2015

Evaluation of presentation

Carrying out and applying audience and product research
Looking at the powerpoint I saw that the audience research was quite good, everything needed was already done and the audience research being primary helped us explain what and why that age was our target audience. The product research was good as well, as there were examples of the different competition and the different versions of chocolate they sell and also the different chocolate that flake offers like the 4 pack.

Presentation of research and Idea
I think the presentation's research was really good as the pages were full, and needed to spoken alot about as there was barely and text on most of them. I think I presented the idea alright, I spoke, somewhat and could have spoke more but I think it was mainly because I had a little bit of stage fright and knowing that it was going to be filmed and put on youtube for the world to see didn't help at all, I think this caused me to then panic and mess up my lines. But I still think for what its worth I did better than I did for the other pitches I did.

Feedback about your idea
The feedback that we had was mainly positive, and to begin with, we were told that the idea of having a split shot would be better, after we went on to talk about maybe having 1 person instead of having 4 people one at a time going the challenge.

Action points to develop in the pre-production

This is a picture of an idea of what split screen could be.
After finished presenting we asked to answer a couple of questions and had a few comments, that could use later on. At 0:20 we were introduced to a new idea in which we could possibly use later which was the idea of either only using 1 or 2 people in the advert, trying the challenge, and having the advert become split screen with 4 people attempting to do the challenge at once. This will change the advert a lot as using either of these ideas could make the advert shorter or longer depending on how long they run on for.

Another idea would be just having us run into random strangers and asking them to do the challenge, this would make the advert seem even more real and show that we have the drive and dedication to the advert but it's quite hard to actually do and when talking to Prinul who will be the presenter he said that when he was doing his documentary he went out to ask people and most of them turned him down or left and didn't come back which would waste time if we were to do it.

Production log week 4

Week 4

24th of may to the 31th of may 2015

What did I do this week?
This week we filmed the actually advert and have a least 25-35 shots filmed for the whole advert. We filmed so many so that if something went wrong in one scene we could use the alternate version of the advert.
On Wednesday we traveled Westfield in Stratford so we could film, we passed though Westfield and arrived at Queen Elisabeth Olympic Park, there we filmed all out shots including Prinul's introductions for the advert and himself, this was filmed just above the swimming pool. We also filmed the first two challengers attempts close to that as before they came we walked around the park to see if we could find a nice place to film but it was too crowded there.One thing I wish could have happened is that we could have is maybe gone to the Orbit tower and filmed inside as inside you can see everything but that cost money to go into and at the time I didn't know we could go inside.

Logistical challenges

A logistical challenge we faced this week was during the Wednesday when we were looking for a section of Olympic park which was meant to have multicoloured floor, we couldn't find it and even attempted looking for the internet for this and saw pictures but not a location. In one photo we even saw both the stadium and  the ArcelorMittal Orbit towards the left of the picture and tried pin-pointing where the picture might have been taken but we couldn't find the coloured floor so ended up filming near the swimming pool as it was quite iconic and had the least amount of people walking around.

Technical Challenges
The only technical challenge I felt that I faced this week was trying the be as different in terms of camera shot types as possible as most of the time I really only use long shots, close-up and mid shots, The way i overcame this was by making the camera pan and spin slowly around the challengers whilst they attempt to eat the flake.

To be done by next week
By next week sunday, I hope to start and finish editing the advert completely and have it uploaded to YouTube by Friday night and start writing up the evaluation of it, also I hope to then start working on the next weekly log.