Unit Evaluation Essay

Going into this unit I had no background in 90% of the things we would have to
use, but I was very interested in the process of making an advert. At first, we
learnt about how brands market their products towards certain types of
people, we learnt about terms like Demographic and Psychometrics. These two
terms helped me a lot when looking at adverts because I could quickly put
them into two different categories.
Old adverts mainly used Demographics. Demographics describes the gender,
age and class of someone. An example of a product that uses demographics is
Yorkie, when we did our advert on Yorkie we researched them and found that
their product used to be marketed specifily to men. This isnt used anymore
because its percieved as sexist and controversial. Most modern adverts use
Psychometrics instead of Demographics. Psychometrics describes values
instead, for example the popular Christmas themed chocolate, Quality Street
market their product towards values like sharing and giving.
Another key thing that we learnt early on was to identify the primary and
seconday audience that a product is trying to appeal too. An example of this
would be Lego. Lego toys are marketed towards children, their primary
audience, but their secondary auidence is parents, young children don’t have
money to buy themselves a box of lego so the advertising tries to appeal to
parents too. Children might see lego as something fun to play around with
however parents might see it as something that they can give to their child to
do while they can get on with other things.

When going into this unit I had high expectations about what we were going to
have to do, I was excited to learn about marketing and how to come up with
ideas (Ideation) and what filming would be like. I was interested to see what It
would be like to fulfil each role in the filming process and to learn to use
premiere pro to edit.
Throughout the unit I learnt how to research more effectively and what
information was important and what was not. When we made our Quality
Street advert, me and my team were talking about Quality Street and one
member said how he dislikes a certain flavour from the box and he would
always take them out and separate them from the rest. This sparked an idea
about what we could base our advert around.
 Unit Evaluation Essay
This helped me realize that even something small like talking about our
opinions on the product could really help us when coming up with an idea.
I think I would not of had this idea if it were not for the research I had done
before, I found out that Quality Street promotes its brand as being all about
sharing, this was the main point of our idea/advert.

In week 1 we were set the brief of creating an advert for a company of our
choice but to also make it appeal to a new target audience. Me and my team
decided to do Red Bull because after watching some of their adverts we liked
how fast paced they were.
So, having chosen our product, we looked at more adverts and researched the
target audience we found out that the main audience was adults. We wanted
to appeal to a younger audience, so we chose teenagers. An audience Red Bull
had not focused on before.
Our idea would be that a student is trying to write an essay for school, but they
are having trouble getting it done. So, they drink a can of Red Bull and
suddenly gets the strength and energy to complete the essay. We thought it
would be a good idea because it was a realistic situation that someone of that
age would go through. I feel like our idea would not be as good if we did not do
our research first. For example, looking at previous Red Bull ads helped us find
the style of filming. In their sports focused adverts, they always have the
camera on the athlete. This is because they want to highlight the main part of
their advert, the fast-paced sports. Before we even started filming, we came
up with Storyboards, shot lists and a script, this helped us structure our ad
better because while we were filming, we could look back and have a refresher
of where we were and how we needed to set the next shot up.
To solve the issue of one person doing everything for pre-production we split
up the work evenly between us, this meant we could do the work at a faster
pace and meant nobody would be left without something to do. Also having
different people doing distinct tasks means that they would write about a
range of opinions from different perspectives.
 Unit Evaluation Essay
Overall, I feel like our production for our Red Bull advert was good compared
to the others because everyone knew what they were doing and they all
chipped in, most people performed very well, for example the person who
acted as “the student” did their part well, however our cameraman made a
few errors and some of the shots were blurry. This was irritating to fix because
we had to retake the shots or accept the blurry clips. This could have been
fixed if the cameraman checked the focus every time we moved the camera.
We used a camera to film the shots, but I made sure that the operator put the
camera in specific positions and to mark the ground so that we could have the
same angle if we had to retake the shot. For example, in scene 3 we had a
close up of the student drinking, and then zoomed out to show him rising like
he was floating. The reason I did this was to further emphasise that the Red
Bull was the focus of the shot. If the camera angle did not change it would not
have the same impact. Also, if the camera did not zoom out then it would not
of established the floating scene as the “turning point” in the advert.

When we had finished the filming process I started editing. This was one of the
first times I had used Adobe Premiere Pro, but I had a basic understanding of
how it worked. I started editing and as I watched the clips back, I had loads of
sound effects pop into my head that could be used in the advert. We also
wanted to use the green screen but because it was the first time many of us
had used premiere, we had no clue how to use it properly. So, with the
teacher’s help we managed to get the thumbnail for the advert.
If I had the chance to redo the advert, I would remind the camera man every
time that we moved to check the focus, I would also learn how to use the
green screen myself, so we did not have to rely on someone outside the group.
 Unit Evaluation Essay
Comparing the Red Bull advert to the rest I would say its my favourite,
although I particularly liked how in week 3 when we did our Kinder egg advert,
we used stop motion. I enjoyed using stop motion because it means we could
mix our skills from the Exploring Animation unit. My least favourite advert was
probably our Yorkie one because although I liked the idea, the advert was not
executed well. Our team did not do much research or plan ideas ahead of
filming, leaving us unprepared. This effected the overall quality of the advert.

I never thought that coming up with an idea and making an advert about it
would be so fun, I specifically liked the filming process as the director because I
could control each scene to make it the best it could be. I also really enjoyed
the editing process because I could experiment with different sound effects
and see what worked. However, If I did this again, I would try and do the foley
ourselves so that it’s all original.