Evaluation

This latest piece of coursework that was assigned to the class was a television advert task.  We started learning about television advertisements roughly in October; this was when we were assigned tasks to do to begin with such as ‘Characteristics of Advertisements’ and ‘Codes and Conventions’ which were two tasks which required us to do a lot of research based work into great detail about advertisements such as finding out what the unique selling point was of the advert which makes it appeal greatly to the target audience that has been set by the institutions.

The brief that was given to us was very important as it went into great detail about what the task was that was going to be given to us. After reading the brief we acknowledged that it was a scenario from ‘Cadbury’s’. What they wanted us to do was design a 30 second advert which was ‘suitable for primetime’, which meant that the advert should have been appropriate for any age range as it would be shown on primetime which is 7pm to 11pm. This may have been because more people watch television between these times than they would in other times such as earlier or later. The aim was to bring an older chocolate which was more well known in previous years back to life and rebrand it in a way that it would begin to appeal to a bigger target audience of all ages and still appeal to the loyal customers that used to and still do buy it. For our advert we tried our hardest to ensure that it met the brief, firstly it met the brief by being exactly 30 seconds long, nothing lower and nothing higher.

Once we created our idea we then had to design a pitch, to do this we created a PowerPoint presentation to convey our ideas. Our presentation was 24 slides, as we weren’t required to add a lot of worded information, we simply made the slides full of images and short words, and this was because most of the information which was going to be presented was going to be from the presenters who were I and Anil. The presentation was initially presented to two Media teachers who were Mr Philipson and Ms Greenfield. As we were required to convey a lot of information, our presentation had to be roughly 20 minutes. Our ideas were conveyed quite effectively as we thoroughly explained what was going to occur in the advert, we also explained greatly about the locations we were going to use as that was an important aspect of the production. In this time we went through all of the information which we had to offer such as (Only a few examples shown, not all):

• ·      Our Idea
• ·      Target Audience (with sound clips from real target audiences)
• ·      Meet my target audience (Information about the target audience such as the ethnicity, age, location and socio-economic group)
• ·      The Ethos of Cadbury’s (Companies Values)
• ·      The Key Message which was going to be conveyed from the advert
• ·      Codes and Conventions of the advert (such as shot types)
• ·      Styles and Forms (What kind of advert it would be such as either humorous or non-humorous)
• ·      The Shot list (Which was shortened to show a little bit as the presentation would have went overboard if the whole shot list was shown and explained)
• ·      Casting
• ·      Locations
• ·      Price comparisons between different shop prices
• ·      The channels which we chose for the advert to be shown on

To make the advert effective we had to ensure that it appealed to the specific target audience that was set to us and also the target audience that we wished for it to appeal to. The target audience that was set to us was just ‘new audiences’ and ‘loyal customer’, however we took it into our own hands to expand the target audience into more detail as we set the target audience to 13 – 50 year old Males. This was because the idea was mostly to do with sports as well. 

For our post production, we had to edit the advert that we had filmed. To do this we had to use the movie program called Final Cut Express on the school iMacs. This was a good program to use as it gave us the luxuries of using many different graphics, audio formats and effects to enhance the performance of our advert. We used many different aspects such as an audio format, and for this we used a song of our choice. Choosing the song was quite a long process as we went through many different songs and changed our decision a few times. The first song we used was the 'Chicago Bulls' theme song, we used this song first as it went well with the shots as the song flowed and matched the beat in the song. After watching the advert a few times with the 'Chicago bulls' song, we felt that something was not right when using this song as there wasn't a good feeling about it so we decided to change the song to something which we thought was more appropriate. After this, we ended up using the 'Jake The Snake' theme song, this was because we felt that it was much more better in terms of matching the advert as it contains tension building parts. 

For our advert, we used many close ups and long shots. A lot of close ups were used to show a lot expression, by this it means to see the characters emotions, by using close ups the viewers get to see what kind of expressions and emotions the characters contain. We also used many long shots to show the location which the advert was set in. For example at 0:09 you can clearly see that the location is a park as there is grass and pavements for people to walk. We used many graphics in our advert, this was to make the advert more interesting and better to see for the audience. The graphics that we mostly used were cross dissolve as it is a good effect to use when navigating through shots. They impacted the final product a lot as before we put them in, the advert was looking very plain and not appealing to look at. however by placing them in, the advert suddenly became more entertaining.

Our advert was very thought through as we wanted the idea to be conveyed very clearly. The idea for the advert was that it was going to be about motivation. Me and my partner spent a long period of time thinking of ideas on how we could make it about motivation. After thinking of many ideas, we came to the conclusion that we firstly will need two actors who will play in the advert, these two actors were going to be very different in appearance physically. We then decided to get one overweight actor and one athletic actor, luckily we already had an idea of who these two will be as we chose two friends of ours. Then we needed to think of how these two actors will be associated with the chocolate which was a 'Time Out' bar. We then came to the conclusion that there will be a race between the two actors to see who gets the chocolate bar first. So, the final idea was that there was a race between both actors and they were both going to be running at each other as the chocolate will be in the middle of the park. As the advert proceeded we added a consistent amount of close ups and long shots. The idea was that if you want something a lot, you will do anything you can in your ability to do so. So as they were both approaching the chocolate the athlete was more closer to the chocolate and was about to grab the chocolate however, the overweight actor froze time by clicking his finger. As it was a fictional advert we made this happen by making the athlete stay still and waited for the right time when everything around was still and made the correct shots. As the overweight actor froze time, he then approached the chocolate as he was the only aspect which was able to move. He then grabbed it and ate it. Then we made a pack shot which appeared and then after the pack shot when everything went back to normal, the athlete asked with his hands raised, "what happened" at 0:28 and then the overweight actor said "I just needed a time out" whilst laughing at 0:29. I believe that the advert would engage the audience as there were many appealing aspects such as humour and action, shown with the time freeze.

In our advert the generic conventions that we used were both motivation and humour. The motivation convention came from the idea behind the advert. The idea was that when you want something a lot you will do anything in your power to do so. In our advert we thought carefully on who we should cast and we came to the conclusion that it simply had to be an overweight person, this is because overweight people aren't really associated with sports and you wouldn't really expect an overweight person to win in a race against an athletic person. So the motivation aspect was that anyone can do something when they put all of their heart into even though in the advert the overweight cheated to get what he wanted but it was fictional and that went into the humour convention also. The humour convention mostly came from the ending at 0:19 when the overweight actor cheated and clicked his fingers and ate the chocolate whilst laughing and we believe that this aspect would have been humorous for the audience. The other humorous moment came at 0:28 when he said "I just needed a time out" which is the chocolates name and actually having a time out, so when the overweight actor consumed the chocolate he was having a time out from the race and also eating the Time Out chocolate. I believe the advert can be related to by new audiences and older loyal audiences. This is because the humour added was a new aspect which wasn't always used in many time out adverts as they used to be a little more serious. To appeal to the older audiences, the will like the ending as they know that the chocolate is known for being consumed during a time out meaning a snack time with tea.

The filming and editing process ended up being very sufficient as it took us roughly three weeks to complete the filming and editing. The filming was completed in the first week of work and the editing took us about two weeks of lesson time. We didn't really come across many problems in the editing process however, in the filming process, it took us a little while to get things going as the first day we had set to start filming wasn't possible as it was raining on that day and our advert was supposed to be filmed in clear weather so we then filmed the next dat. Apart from that, we didn't really come across any serious problems.
We thought carefully about which costumes the actors should wear. This is because their costumes should match the actors themselves. We decided on the overweight actor to wear a vest and joggers to show that he was overweight evidently shown at 0:16 with the panned down shot showing the athlete struggling to run and showing the vest and stomach. The athlete wore tight sports closed to show that he didn't have any excess weight to be shown. The setting was in a park which is where we thought was the best place to set the advert. This is because there was a lot of free place to film, we chose Valentines Park which is a very appealing park. Everything did in the end work together to give a clearer feel to the advert as it all worked out well.