Part 1

Part 1 – Research


During July 2008 the students of A2 Media Studies were set the task of planning, producing and evaluating either a music video or three adverts. My group consisted of two people, Atia Anzalchi and myself. After discovering the type of coursework we were going to do, we initially constructed a basic still image advert in order to get some insight into the kinds of things we would need to do for this coursework. We then took a brief look at some previous students work from our college and from other student across the country. This was done in order to get a feel for what our adverts needed to contain and get an idea of the various styles that exist and can be implemented in advertising. We also wanted to see what makes a quality advert regarding, camera angles, mise-en-scene and narrative. As well as examining other students work we also looked at real production adverts as to discover the codes and conventions which many adverts contain.

We began by listing a few ideas for adverts that are seen in magazine and on television often (see blog post Wednesday, 8 October 2008). We needed to think in-depth about the audience we were aiming at as the themes within our adverts affect everyone across the globe After much deliberation we decided we wanted to produce ‘corny’ and humorous adverts surrounding a current global issue in order to promote awareness. We decided upon global warming and climate change as it presented many possibilities and avenues for us to take our coursework down. One existing advertising campaign that heavily influenced our planning was the Brad & Earth advertisements (see blog posts Tuesday, 24 June 2008 and Wednesday, 8 October 2008) which were airing on MTV around the time we were set this task. We believed that the Brad and Earth advertisements are very effective as well as being entertaining. By being entertaining it works to draw in the audience and helps them to take note of what is being said as the advert is easily digestible and memorable. We proceeded to create a treatment in which we put forward our proposals to our teacher in order to gain his opinion on our chosen campaign. The treatment (see blog post Wednesday, 15 October 2008) outlined each of the advertisements in minor detail and provided a backbone structure from which to work from. We decided upon using various scenes from popular blockbuster movies that have been released over the years. Part of the reasoning behind these choices was that it would allow the audience to associate with our adverts better and we hoped it may add a deeper level of humour due to the fact that the characters would be shown in a more whimsical way (see blog post Thursday, 16 October 2008) From this we set out to produce a set of storyboards for each of our three adverts (see various blog posts). Atia took this task on as well as devising scripts for each of our adverts. We made various changes during the period where we were developing our storyboards. Such changes included changing our 3rd and final advert from shots of changing weather with a family’s facial expressions changing to an advert based on the famous scene from Scarface where Tony Montana busts out of his office in his final hour of desperation. We made this change due to the fact that it fitted in with the themes of our other two adverts much better. We also based this decision upon looking into the difficulties that would be presented during the production of this advert and decided that the hurdles we would face may be too time consuming and may compromise the quality of our other advertisements.

I proceeded to devise a shooting schedule which would be used to organise and plan the times at which we would be carrying out the filming. This was a great idea because it would allow us to keep track of the time we spent on our coursework and make sure we allotted enough time to our work so as to make sure it was complete by the deadlines set, however this was only beneficial if you stuck to the original schedule which, unfortunately, we did not. I also took on the responsibility of obtaining and looking after the equipment which would be used for filming which included all of our props, clothing, camera and tripod. We both took on the responsibility of finding and acquiring suitable actors for the roles in each of our adverts. This was difficult as we could only realistically use students from our college due to the time constraints placed upon us. Another things that made this task increasingly more difficult was the fact that other students obviously had their own work to progress with. The first set of actors we used were unreliable and unprofessional resulting in an advert of poor quality which we later scrapped.

Overall our planning stage went averagely as we did complete many of the essential things we needed in order to begin shooting. However our lack of effort and dedication impacted our work which became apparent when we actually began filming. The aforementioned difficulties such as unreliable actors, not sticking to our shooting schedule and a severe lack of dedicating time to our coursework were the most damaging factors through the planning stages and the realisation of our advertising coursework.