Commercial

  The very first project we had for our AICE Media Studies class was a commercial. I remember we could choose from a list of companies to make a commercial on and work in groups of up to four students with whoever we wanted. The group I worked with for this project is who I worked with for every project we did. This project was significant in that it was my first hands-on experience with film making. For this project I was the one behind the camera. I never really saw myself as an actor, but camera work sounded fun and I was excited to start filming. We had started with the storyboard and we had came up with a story that we liked. I was then in charge of coming up with the shots and angles we would use to execute that story. When it came to this, I looked my list of film terms that I wrote in class when we took notes. I realized that there was a lot of terms and it would be challenging to incorporate a lot of them into the commercial. In the end, a lot of these shots and angles were cut out of the final project due to the time limit, which was 30 seconds. In the end we had a mid shot, a high angle, a wide shot, a zoom, an extreme close up, a long shot, and a two shot. A lot of what we planned in our storyboard for the commercial didn't end up coming to fruition. This was mostly because we had a very limited amount of time to film. Due to this we just couldn't film some of things we wanted to do. However, this may have been good since we had to cut out over 35 seconds of footage to get the commercial within the time limit anyway. When it came to editing, it was very simple, surface level stuff. When we got to the computer, the hardest part was putting clips all together to create one cohesive film that was under the time limit. I was mostly in charge of cutting shots out and proved to be very difficult, since I had to decide which shots were more important than the others. After this, we added some music to make the commercial more exciting. Last, we added the smoke effect that you see when one of the characters eats a spicy chicken nugget from Wendy's. Overall, this was a great project to get us kick started into the world of film making.