Ad (Assignment 2): Final thoughts

Hello!

So this week we finally presented our ad assignment! I was quite excited because I was actually quite proud of what me and my team mate produced. First of all, I was paired up with Agne and she assumed the role of the producer and I assumed the role of the Director, for the first time. When we decided which roles each of us would play, I was nervous yet excited because I knew that I wanted to try out being the director because I felt it was something that I need to do and that it would give me the opportunity to have my creative ideas be more ‘in the open’, so to speak. So when we settled on the roles, we then delved into the topic of which product we would want to make an ad about, and after a a somewhat brief discussion, we decided on doing it about the Marks & Spencers brand, primarily the food department. And the fact that Agne actually works in the company made it even more easy to decide on this as our focus for the film.

After this I then came down to actually writing down the script and storyboard and Agne was in the search of locations and actors. Our first idea was to make the 30 second ad about a family who when eating by themselves, they felt free to do so with no inhibitions or embarrassment, but when eating together as a family unit they felt repressed about showing who they ‘really were’. But after much discussion in class with Helen, we decided that we needed to change our idea to one much more simpler and easy to portray, so that is where the idea of the ‘food porn’, if you will, came to be.

I thought that best way to make an effective ad would be to follow the simpler and more obvious route of inspiring myself on the ads that M&S has done for years and draw from that my inspiration to do our short film.

Now onto the actual filming process: we started shooting in my kitchen on a Thursday and the shoot lasted around 4 hours, give or take, and it was quite smooth and easy. Easy because the communication lines between me and my Producer were always open to new suggestions and ideas, so that we could experiment with different things.

Ad stills.

             

Production photos.

The materials we used for the shoot were:

• Lighting equipment
• Canon 600D
• Laptop

• And the props were:

• Food
• White plate
• Fork
• Black card boards
• Toppings (Olive oil, grated cheese and sugar)

And after our shooting, we knew we needed to do a voice-over so Agne was able to find Jess, that was eager to help out, to be our voice in the film. And after I booked the recording studio with Peter Thomas (who I owe a special thanks to for helping us out so much!) we delved into shooting the voice-over which consisted of take after take after take of the different lines from the script being said over and over again until we got the best out of all of them. And one thing that I actually wasn’t thinking would happen was the fact that I actually had to rewrite a few lines because when we actually heard them being spoken, they didn’t quite make sense to the images and what we wanted to portray so it was very helpful to have gone through those changes and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. So a big thanks to Jess for being the awesome voice and Peter Thomas for lending us his insight (and time) into the magical world of sound. We couldn’t have done it without you guys.

Recording studio time.

Script

And here is the script for the ad.