Senior Year Commercial

Now that senior year has started, the first assignment due was a commercial. I had a group of four people made up of two juniors and two seniors. Hadley was our art director, who turned into the cinematographer. Carson was our cinematographer that turned into our actor and editor, Nathan was our editor that assisted Carson with the final project, and I was the director that helped with the acting as well as additional camera work.
We chose to take an HP laptop as our product because this year we will be moving to the 1-to-1 at Olathe Northwest so we wanted to do a little bit of advertising around that. The whole concept came from Misson Impossible. We did not have a script when it came to this video, we just had a storyboard to plan out our shots.

The group wanted this video to be intense, but also be a little cheesy just out of the fact that the viewer doesn't quite understand why the character is running. The concept originally started out with the idea that Mac was better than an HP because that is what we, eComm, use for our entire program. Once the planning began we quickly realized that we were trying to shove too much into one minute of screen time and we needed to make something more simplistic.

Pre-Production - 

After the groups were assigned, coming up with an idea took place. At first, we weren't completely sure what to do but we all knew we wanted it to be something popular so we ended up taking a laptop to film with. We made storyboards and decided we did not need a script because we wanted it to just be an action blurb. From there we starting planning out everything that needed to take place. From there everyone took on a production role, and I took on the director.

Production - 

This was the hardest part for our group due to the fact that not everyone was going to be there no matter what day we chose to film. Our actor did not show up three different days, so finally on the last day, we chose to film, three out of the four of us just knocked out the project. Carson ended up having to be our actor, and Hadley ended up doing cinematography instead of art direction so there was a switch up of roles right before production actually began. 

Post-Production - 

Carson and Nathan took on all of the edits, this was the time that I was very hands off for a big project. Hadley and I would check in with the guys to make sure they were sticking to the storyboard as well as editing it to how the whole group originally saw the vision. Much of the time spent on editing and the "post-production" phase was used for working on my website as well as planning different video projects I am taking this year. 

Five Guarantees: 

Technical Skills - 

This project no one in the group really took the time to learn anything new, it was all from what we remembered from last year. The most "technical" things got, was when Hadley and I worked the camera together to make sure we could get the focus right. 

Communication - 

The communication within our group seemed to be an issue because not everyone could be there on the day we had discussed and our actor did not show up one time. He canceled multiple times which happened to create stress that was not needed. 

Leadership - 

Hadley and I were the ones that really took leadership on this assignment, the guys were pretty hands off and not really involved. 

Collaboration - 

When assigning groups, it was more of a "collaboration" than previous projects done in eComm. We meshed groups together to bring in new ideas.

Project Management - 

Aside from the communication problems, this project went really smoothly. We were integrating with the new class of juniors, and it was our first assignment. 

General Thoughts:

Improvements - 

After receiving feedback from the class, a lot of valid points were made. Our video is difficult to identify what we were advertising. It bounces around a lot between shots, and it is kinda all over the place. I would want us to go back and rework the story a little bit, or maybe change the product in general to something we could make more comedic as opposed to action base. 

Conclusions - 

I enjoyed the new connections I made with the group on this project. Smaller things like this are what I am hoping to get better at as the year progresses. This is looking to be a very good one and I think the new insight coming from the juniors is going to help us have a really strong feature film this year.