Sunday, 19 April 2009

Plans for re-shoots

The re-shoots will be on a tight schedule due to people only being available at certain times etc. We therefore have had the 6th and 8th of April to try and finish as many re-shoots as we can complete ready for editing.

Delay's that we have encountered

Recently, (since prior discussions about the advert) there have been several delays in the production of advert 3 (re-shoots, editing the re-shoots and music) meaning that we are getting more and more behind our original plans/schedule therefore are not progressing. Hannah and I have tried to decide on shots in which we will use for our third advert, yet the ideas that we have seem to make the advert over complicated. We have attempted to overcome this problem make notes on the order in which we will film our re-shoots to avoid confusion, as well as draw up a brief storyboard of the shots we will need to do. This will help filming go quicker as well as give us an idea of what the outcome should look like.

Another delay which we have had is characters/actors. Firstly, it has been difficult to get our actors available at the same time meaning that it is impossible to film because we cannot change actors now, and in most of the shots we need the two of them to be present. This has therefore meant that we have had to reschedule our planned filming on several occasions despite us trying to overcome this by organising to meet in advance. Secondly, after our discussion with our teacher, we decided not to use the same girl to play the mother role, therefore we have had to try and find somebody else. Using a real mother, or somebody who is distinctively older than the couple, is the ideal because it will make the advert more understandable to an audience. The only time in which we could have a character like this is during the holiday when Hannah’s mum would be free to film with us, including any extra re-shoots if necessary. This does however mean that there would be a week where we can not do much filming, but it allows me and Hannah to look through music, deciding upon a potential soundtrack to accompany the action as well as complete shots which do not have the mother in etc. The risk of doing this is that we may not finish or even start the editing during the break therefore will have to stay after school to finish off the editing for the advert. Me and Hannah have, however, agreed that we will stay a couple of hours to complete the advert, and try and get it done within two long after school sessions in order to try and get it done in one go because we find this a better, more convenient method than doing little work across several days.

Changes of Advert 3 (2)

As said in the previous post, there are going to be several changes made to the advert. Below is a quick breakdown of what happens in the advert now:

-Establishing shots of the couple arriving at the house. Both dressed smartly. Boy wearing shirt and tie and geeky glasses, girl in shirt and black trousers. (LS)
-Aud. aware of nervousness of the boy through dialogue ‘I hope your mum likes me’ said whilst girl adjusts his tie (CU)
-Couple enter the house, girl calls ‘mum, I’m home’ (MS)
-Boy is introduced to girl’s mother. It is established that the mother thinks the boy has bad breath. Dialogue including ‘mum this is Ben’ and ‘nice to finally meet you’ etc (MS & CU)
-Couple settle down in the house, when they are alone they hold hands etc like previous adverts, passing of time is shown (CU, MS)
-Mother re-joins them followed by awkwardness. Mother then raises the question ‘Do you use projection’ (MS, CU)
-Reaction shots of couple. Followed by speech such as ‘Well..’ and ‘mum!’ (CU)
-Jingle (CU)
-End shots, mother passing mint to boy and acceptance of boy by mother (CU, MS)

Friday, 20 March 2009

Changes in advert 3 (1)

After filming and editing a large amount of advert 3 (see below for first uncompleted version of this advert), we weren’t sure as to whether our idea worked well in achieving verisimilitude and meeting the codes and conventions of an advert. We felt this because unlike the other two adverts, according to our original storyboard, there is a lot more speech in this advert and to begin with it did not look the way we had originally wanted it to look because it felt too story telling. Furthermore, we had difficulty finding somebody to play the role of the mother because everybody that was available for filming looked too much like the actual couple meaning that realism was lost. Me and Hannah therefore decided to get some opinions from our teacher on what can be improved on and found that we had to more or less re-shoot the whole advert. There were many aspects of the advert that needed changing as well as many problems which needed to be resolved. Below is a list of things which became an issue when we discussed our draft of the advert.

• Characters in the advert – The person who played the role of the mother looked too much like the actual couple therefore lacked realism. Furthermore, the narrative is not made clear enough meaning that the audience do not understand why the mother over reacts to the couple’s over affections/kiss. We are going to amend this by re-shooting during the half term, meaning that Hannah’s mum will be available for us to shoot.
• Mise en scene – We made both characters have a smarter look to meet the parents, yet the male character needs to be wearing a tie in order for us to include more shots at the beginning, for example, his girlfriend adjusting his tie. Furthermore, we are going to keep the ‘geek’ look by making him wear the glasses which also help in recognition for audiences.
• Dialogue – In our original storyboard, there was dialogue in the majority of the shots because this helps audiences to understand what is happening. However, when shooting, we did not use dialogue and this therefore makes the advert confusing, lacks realism and looses its narrative. Secondly, the fact that it was only the mother that spoke her line makes the whole shot look out of place. Next time we shoot, we are going to get the actors to speak so we can use this as our dialogue.
• Narrative – Some tweaks needs to be done in the narrative/arrangement of the shots in the advert. At the start, the couple ring the bell however it came to our attention that if you are seeing your parents, you would just walk in. Therefore we have to have a re-look at our original storyboard and remove some shots which are not necessary.

After these discussions of the problem, we then decided on re-shoots to replace the ones that we already had. Despite this meaning that we would have to re-shoot more or less the whole advert, it means that our advert will ultimately meet the codes and conventions a lot more than what it did before, therefore producing a higher quality advert.

Advert 3

Below is a video of advert 3 so far:
(to be uploaded)

Friday, 27 February 2009

Music for Advert 3

Me and Hannah have spend a large amount of time looking for music to suit advert 3. From a very early stage, we decided that we did not want music with lyrics because this would clash with the dialogue present in the advert. We have therefore had to find and instrumental version of a song and/or within a song.

Eventually we decided to use the instrumental version of 'Heartbeat' by Scouting for Girls. (See below to hear music) We have chosen this song because we feel that when edited, certain parts will fit with the action, for example, the heart beat at the start and end of the song would fit well with the beginning of the advert because it would highlight that the boy is nervous to meet his girlfriends' parents. Furthermore, the song fits well with the pace of the advert which is a vital thing to consider when choosing music.

Below are just a few other examples of music that we looked at, but rejected:
- Instrumental version of 'That's not my name' by The Ting Tings
- Instrumental version of 'Are you gonna be my girl' by Jet
- Instrumental version 'she's so lovely' by Scouting for Girls
- Intro of 'Kids' by MGMT
- Instrumental version of 'Love story' by Taylor Swift

Below is a YouTube video of the song which we ultimately decided to use:

Thursday, 26 February 2009

Uploading footage onto macs

After our first two shoots from the previous day me and Hannah spend a double free period in the mac suite to upload what we had so far. This proved to be very time consuming because the camera that we were using from home had problems connecting to the MACs meaning that we could not capture the footage from the camera to the programme. We wasted a significant amount of time trying to work out a way for us to upload the footage and all this meant that we had not yet moved forward with our work. With the interruption of a fire bell, we then had to abandon what we were doing and come back to it as we had planned, after school. This caused us a lot of worry because we felt like our progress had come to a halt and that we were not going to get any footage done with the seemingly bad luck that we seemed to have. We did however pick ourselves up by persisting in trying to get the things we wanted to get done so that eventually we could put something together.

After school that day, we successfully managed to get hold of a camera. This was a relief to us because we could finally get all of our filming out of the way the following day, and we could finally upload the footage that we had so far.

Me and Hannah spent about 2-3 hours uploading the footage, and taking the decent shots to put the opening on the advert together. We managed to fully edit the first couple of seconds of the advert meaning that we had to finish filming and editing the rest of the advert because we had rejected the rest of the footage. The opening which we put together matched the storyboard, and we felt that it created a successful opening couple of shots to the rest of the advert. The footage that we rejected was not good enough because it seemed sloppy, and felt too similar to the previous advert because the couple were sitting on the same sofa. We therefore have gone against the original storyboard and have decided to have the advert set in the kitchen so that the location differs in all three adverts.