AICE Media Studies

  How does your product use or challenge conventions AND how does it represent social groups or issues? Our product uses the conventions often found in other, similarly targeted products. Our product is very commonly consumed by the general populace, especially athletes and others in physically intensive professions or hobbies. It also is typical with how other products with a similar target group advertise themselves, placing an emphasis on success and overcoming in the context of physical activity and exercise. The use of these conventions helps the consumer become familiar with the concept of our product and the potential dividends. In addition, our product, while not particularly divisive or polarizing, does represent a social group of people who are determined to excel in their chosen field, and who have an unstoppable drive to be better than those around them. How does your product engage with audiences AND how would it be distributed as a real media text? Our product engages...

 Overall, for a first "real" project, this commercial project was remarkably issue-free. I'd worked with my partner once before, but it was on an assignment much smaller-scale than this one, and much easier. Even so, just by working together we had a synergy of sorts and have expectations as to each other's performance. Personally, after our commercial has been finished and polished, I would say that, while I'm happy enough with the final product, I do think it could still be improved. The timing and working of some shots was sloppy, but that's a small consequence. Overall I think it turned out quite good- not perfect, but good. I learned a lot about the basics of how to properly make a piece of film from this project, as I've had no previous experience with any kind of production work. This project was something of an experimental phase, to get my bearings and understand what was expected and how to produce it. 

  Today, my group and I primarily polished our commercial to ready it for submission. Once I had picked out the integrated soundtrack and my partner had organized all the clips, we worked together to try and sync transitions to be as close to the music as possible. About halfway through this process, we decided to try and reorganize the layout of our video to make it flow better, and to work better with the music. Eventually we decided to only switch the position of one short clip, so two related shots could transition into each other. Once this had been done, our transitions were much easier to complete, and we moved on to the next step. We decided on primarily using a simple dissolve transition, rather than any flashy, over-the-top transitions which were offered to us. After I finalized my audio choice, and we had trimmed the length of various clips to match the music as best we could, I moved on to adjusting the volume as my partner began looking at sound effects. In the end, th...

 Today my group and I did the first part of our editing to finalize our commercial project. We first researched film editing software which we could use to complete the project on our own separate devices. After some conferring, we decided on using iMovie, which is reputed to be easy to use and effective. After this, I went through the eight video clips which had been filmed on my device and chose which three would be best to use as my partner did the same. Once I had decided on which clips would be used, I trimmed some time off all of them and did what I could to adjust their size and framing, before sending them to my partner to be consolidated with his clips and uploaded into the editing software. Once they had been uploaded into iMovie, as my partner began to edit the clips and splice them together, I began searching for audio which I felt was fitting to the overall theme and feel of our commercial. I began searching by looking at previous Gatorade commercials, such as the ones...

 Today  (10/4)  my  group did the second round of shots for our project.   We'd already completed nearly all of the shots required last class (9/30) so we just had one specific type of shot left, and any potential retakes, for this class.   Part of our commercial requires cutting to a stopwatch as a measure of skill and to demonstrate an improved performance.   This, in turn, required us to record a phone with a timer on it, to serve as our stopwatch. However, last period was very sunny, with very little cloud cover, and it was difficult to get a shot of the phone which wasn't wracked with glare and reflection. We were hoping that this class would be more cloudy and we could get a better shot of the phone. Unfortunately, today was also quite bright, so we had to alter our plan slightly. We instead moved into some trees, just off the track, which were casting shade and would be easier to record in. In the shade, we took three different sh...