1000 Word Evaluation
Our assignment was to create a thirty second advertisement for a product of our choice. My advertisement was for Skittles, aimed at the ages of four to twenty as Skittles has a wide range audience to target. I aimed it at my target audience by using pathos and aiming for the Maslow's hierarchy of needs of love and belonging, along with esteem.
What Went Well
My advert was aimed at the need of love and belonging from Maslow's hierarchy of needs and esteem. I believe I captured this well through the representation of the child sharing the Skittles with everyone around her. It is a natural human reaction to want to be loved by another, making my style of advertisement appeal to the audience very well and convincing them to buy this product to bring more happiness to their lives. I used the fact of the child sharing as the saying goes "Sharing is caring", expressing love and affection for the one they share with.
This can further be explained through the fact that my advertisement is Pathos; an advertisement that will try to evoke an emotion to the audience. My aim with using pathos was to target the audience with emotions, expressing happiness and comfort throughout the advertisement. I did this by using bright and exaggerating colours to express emotion to the audience as colours can express many emotions, using blue for comfort and red for love. This meant that colours played a very important part, along with the storyboard, in getting the moral of the story across to the audience. Bright colours were used to express their emotions, each actor in the advertisement wearing a different coloured shirt and also fitting into the colour scheme of Skittles for the most part. This gave the audience a feel of the advertisement and what emotions were being expressed towards them, allowing to capture the feel of the advertisement. In editing, I used colour correction to make the colours even brighter to attract the audiences eyes and equalize to make the colours change to the same level of brightness.
The shooting day went to plan, apart from the children getting bored at certain parts. I managed to get in and record in one day, everyone being co operative and helpful throughout. After explaining to them all what I was trying to get and what they had to do, everyone was ready and good to go. This made the shoot go much easier as everyone was very communicative and willing to redo their scene.
Changes Made
Some changes were made throughout making my advertisement. One big change was the use of camera shots because I didn't stick to what my storyboard shown. I did shots from different angles from how I may of originally planned as it fitted the scene better or obstacles were in the way to do what I had planned before.This allowed me to work with more camera angles than I had originally planned and made the product look more professional than my original plans. This also enforced that I was creative with my camera angles and techniques used, fitting to my aim much better than before. I kept the story to how the storyboard was planned, but strayed from the camera shots and angles used. This happened mostly because of the layout of the house limited me to do certain shots and many of the shots planned weren't possible for my location. Knowing this now, it will teach me to observe the location more to make sure the shot I plan can be done easily.
Issues and Lessons Learnt
One issue that arose was lighting. For some shots when I was recording, the scene wasn't bright enough as lighting was difficult to plan and control on how much light was entering the room. To make sure there was some natural light, every room I shot in had a window to ensure this. To make it brighter, I used colour effects in editing to make the scenes brighter and easier to see for the audience. I've learnt that in the future to bring in lighting equipment to make scenes brighter and to look more professional, especially in colder months.
Another issue was working with two children for actors. The children got tired and bored quickly, meaning I had to keep them entertained whilst recording. This made it very difficult to get all the shots I needed and made me have to convince the children to keep going as I had to do shots multiple times. The children did work well and I got all the shots needed, but I learnt that children are very difficult to work with.
Something that was difficult to do was the rainbow in after effects as I have very little experience with the after effects program. It took me a while to get the rainbow looking good in the shot and to look more professional. This has taught me to learn more about a program before using it. If I had more time, I would've made the rainbow look more professional in how it moves and where it is placed but it turned out very good for a first attempt in after effects and could be applied more professionally if I had more time.
My shots could've been more improved to look more professional by using better lighting. This would of made my shots brighter and more attractive to the eye of my audience as it would express the colours in the scene much more than natural lighting. If I had better equipment, camera and lights, it would of made my advertisement look much more professional and look more like an actual TV advertisement, but would of been very expensive equipment to obtain, because it would've improved the quality of the advertisement.
I would use better lighting equipment to make all the shots look brighter and more professional to avoid lighting problems later on. I'd also make a more detailed storyboard to advance my creativity skills further and to know exactly what every actor was doing and how every scene would've looked. It would also allow me to know exactly what shots to do to make a professional looking advertisement that attracts the audience.
