ZIGZAG – PITCHING FOR NEW BUSINESS –
Zig Zag Big Warehouse Sale presentation
For the Zig Zag pitch we decided to choose the client “Big Warehouse Sale”. We decided to choose this client as with them selling such a wide range of products there would be a lot of fun and intriguing adverts that we could create around them. As the big warehouse sale sells a range of products we thought that we could focus each advertisement on a different target audience, people of all ages need flooring and furniture. We wanted to create advertisements that people would remember, for example the was the Go Compare adverts (AdsNTrailors, 2010). This was the inspiration for our first advert concept which was to have a loud and comedic man going around a warehouse shouting “It is a Big Warehouse sale!” this is then including the company’s name into the advert and by having him shouting it repeatedly will make sure it gets stuck in the audience’s head.
Another advert idea we had was based around a man’s life all going wrong until he purchases a new carpet from the big warehouse which then makes everything okay, giving the audience a sense of relaxation associated with the brand. The finale advert idea we had was an old man with back pain finding a new bed to help solve his back troubles, this then making the audience relate the company with comfort. For each advert we made sure to incorporate all the client’s current deals as that is what is going to get the audience interested.
In our presentation for each advert we made sure to include the advert concept, reason for concept, objectives, target audience, distribution, timeline and budget. This then giving the client all the relevant information about the concepts, so they can fully understand the projects and make a good informed decision. Although the PowerPoint was very text heavy I feel like this was necessary to portray all the information and that as a group we laid out all the information in a way that made it an easy enjoyable read. We made sure to include a lot demographics on our target audiences so that the client knew that all of our ideas had reasoning behind them and weren’t just plucked out of thin air.
References-
AdsNTrailors, 2010. Go Compare ‘Tenor’ Coffee Shop Advert. [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUyxIoitg_M [Accessed 20 January 2019].
YORK TOURISM TRAVEL VLOG –
The brief for this task was to create two videos, one 3 minutes long and one 1 minute that could be for the Instagram platform. The videos were to be a tourism vlog of York in the style of a vlogger. One of the biggest tourist attractions of York are the bars, people come from all over England for a weekend of drinking in York so we thought that would be the best aspect to focus our vlog on. Especially since our target audience was young people and a favourite hobby of most young people is drinking alcohol. On my Instagram feed I find that on a weekend my whole feed is filled with people going out drinking, it would be perfect to post our video during the week as it would spark interest from all the people planning to go out drinking with their friends that weekend and may even make them, decide to come to York for that.
Our vlog contained little talking and was mostly visuals with music in the background. We did this as we felt that we could still tell a story only using visuals and having Harry pull some entertaining facial expressions. We wanted the audience to feel as though they were there with us by using a static frame. “A static frame is a proscenium. The action of the scene is presented as a stage show: we are a third – person observer” (Brown, 2016). We made sure to include plenty of shots of inside the bars and the cocktails they made to provide a more in-depth view of them, helping the audience decide whether they would want to visit. York is more popular for day drinking than it is night drinking, so we thought that filming during the day would show off York in the light that the audience would be visiting in. We made sure to use copyright free music to prevent the video being taken down. We included stock footage in the beginning of the video which was nice views around York giving the viewer a look at the beautiful scenery and not just the beautiful alcohol.
References –
Brown, B. (2016) Cinematography theory and practice. New York: Routledge.
Lifestyle product ADVERTORIAL –
We were told to create an advertisement for a lifestyle product of our choice. The advert must have included how to use the product and it’s features. We decided to use Beats headphones as our product as in our group we already had three pairs showing that it is a very popular brand. The headphones are best known for their sound counselling ability, so we decided to base the advert around that feature. We wanted to show someone getting really annoyed at all of the sounds around them and this feeling being replaced with enjoyment as they put the headphones on and start listening to music. We then had them dancing around and using all of the other features such as turning the volume up and down and answering phone calls.
We had been told in the brief to create a soundscape for the advert and this concept was perfect for this. We collected lots of different annoying sounds such as bird chirping and traffic to use at the beginning of the video when all of the sounds of the natural world are getting too much for the guy which I then created a soundscape for during editing. We used the radio mic to create a special moment of the sound of the noise counselling headphones closing around someone’s ears, we did this by putting the earphones around the mic so that the sound was very realistic.
Something I think we did well for this task was planning, we made sure that we had a storyboard drawn up that we could follow and we scouted out locations before the shoot day giving us more time to use for filming.
Something that we could have improved on was lighting, this was hard to control as we were filming outside and we filmed one morning during winter when the sun was very low. This unfortunately made some of the shots have uneven lighting.
I think that this advert was very comedic and memorable and would be very entertaining for the audience making them more likely to buy the product.
PITCHING FOR A MUSIC VIDEO –
Perfect isn’t Enough -The And Ensemble Music Video Pitch
For this task we we’re given a client brief from a young band situated in York called The and Ensemble. They wanted us to come up with an affordable concept for their new song “Perfect isn’t enough”. We next decided to research the band and take a look at some of their music videos to see what type of content they had already created. This included their songs “The Bins” (The and Ensemble, 2015) and “And And And” (The and Ensemble, 2016), both videos were very fun and playful, which helped us get a better idea of the vibe of the band and what kind of music video concept they would like.
Our presentation for the music video concept was set out very well, each slide tackled an important aspect of the pre-production and any other information the band would want to know. This included an overview of the concept, the objectives of the video, the idea in more depth, the budget, target audience and timeline of production. We also made sure to dedicate one slide to a visuals of how we would want the video to look. We used examples such as “Friday” by Rebecca Black (Rebecca, 2011) and “Gives you Hell” by The All-American Rejects (The All-American Rejects, 2009) to represent the theme of our concept.
Our finished idea for the music video was to have the lead singer Abby Hall looking for a suitable boy to date with the help of her parents which would be the boys in the band dressed up. There would be different looking boys coming to the door of the house and with a use of a green screen we would have them showing different location of where they would take the girl on a date. We thought that we could have the father dress up as Jim from Friday Night Dinner as he is a current contemporary online trend.
This would stay in their budget as the set would be free as we could film at anybody’s house and use the green screen from the university and props would be cheap, this idea continues the fun and playful theme from their previous videos.
References –
The All-American Rejects, 2009. The All-American Rejects – Gives You Hell (Full Narrative Version). [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxUATkpMQ8A [Accessed 21 January 2019]
Rebecca, 2011. Rebecca Black – Friday. [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0 [Accessed 21 January 2019]
The and Ensemble, 2016. The And Ensemble – And And And (Hey Hey Hegel). [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrpOhWpMeek [Accessed 21 January 2019]
The and Ensemble, 2015. The And Ensemble – The Bins. [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foE_LPMUFOY [Accessed 21 January 2019]
MAKING A MUSIC VIDEO –
For our music video we decided to create a video for “Where is my mind?” by the Pixies. Before we had chosen the song we had decided as a group that we wanted to do a more serious video as the rest of our videos and concepts for this module have been very fun and zany and we wanted to be able to show that we can do much more professional content. One member of the group then suggested “Where is my mind?” as there is no original video by the band which gave us the chance to not have a preconceived idea of what the video should look like.
We wanted our video to be very experimental, our idea was to have a girl sat in front of a projector with big life events playing over her face and onto the background. We did this by using the black box studio which prevented any natural light from affecting our shot keeping us completely in control of the lighting. We chose to have a light shining on the side of Kate’s face so one side was a lot darker than the other, “Lighting from the side or back reveals the shape of an object – its texture and subtleties of form.” (Brown, 2016). The lighting reflects that she is both bright and dark, happy and sad and is very confused mentally. This relates to the song as it is all about someone struggling with mental illness and not being sure where their mind is. “[Lighting] also can reveal character emotional values, and other clues that may have story importance” (Brown, 2016).
The video that was projected onto Kate’s face was recorded earlier in production, 70% of the footage being our own and 30% stock footage. As the video was a representation of the big parts of life we knew that there would be parts that we couldn’t film, for example birth, childhood and being old unless we hired actors. This was resolved by searching the internet for relevant stock footage.I think this artefact was our best as it was a lot deeper than our other work and the editing went really well with the vibe we were going for.
References –
Brown, B. (2016) Cinematography theory and practice. New York: Routledge.
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW VIDEO –
This task was to create a 4-5 minute video reviewing and comparing the Canon C100 digital cinema camera and the Canon 77D DSLR camera. We were only given an hour and a half to film which made this task quite a challenge. As a group we decided that we’d rather tell the viewers about all of the features and relevant information rather than showing them through filming on each camera. If we had had more time to do this task we would have definitely done both aspects and thinking back a way we could have improved was if we had split the crew in half and had some people filming a verbal review and the others going out and filming a visual review.
We wanted our presenter to show all of the features of each camera including both positives and negatives to give a balanced review which I think we did well. I do however think that we could’ve improved by taking some time before filming to plan more what we were going to say so that the presenter didn’t sound like he was just rambling to fill up the time.
One problem that occurred was noise pollution, this was due to the room we were given to film in as it was next to a busy corridor which meant that the mic picked up a lot of background noise.
This task really opened our eyes to the real world of media production due to the time constraint and how you could be expected to turn round a video in such little time. I think that our group could have definitely produced much higher quality content however the time constraint really shocked us and we rushed to get it done rather than taking time to plan it out which we definitely did have time to do.