Week Two: TV Advertisement

 Week Two - Day One

Our assignment this week was to create a TV advertisement for an already existing product, an original product or to recreate a TV advertisement.. But first, what is a TV advertisement? A TV advertisement is a paid commercial broadcast on television to promote a service, product or brand. So, to start us off, my tutor, Pete, showed us all Christmas adverts, such as the John Lewis "The Bear And The Hare", Inspired by this, I decided to look into Christmas adverts a little deeper but, considering we only had a week to complete this, I came to the conclusion this would be difficult to finish. Instead, I decided to do something with stop motion. I decided on stop motion because:

• I had never used stop motion before and wanted to gain some experience in an area I was unfamiliar with
• We have all the resources available in our studio so it was easily accessible
• Stop motion allowed me to be creative and free with my ideas, which I loved the idea of

And so, I started to research different stop motion advertisement examples and came across multiple food animations and decided to dig deeper with a focus on the food aspect whilst also referring back to the "Codes and Conventions" my tutor, Paula, showed us (Miro board):

What I picked up on:

• Upbeat music is used in every advertisement
• The use of a plain background is seen in every advert to try and make the product and logo stand out more
• There is a lot of movement in the food, possibly to make it seem more desirable
• Some adverts feature a hand taking the food as if its something you cannot leave your hands off - its irresistible
• There weren't many close ups, the camera seemed to stay at the same distance for many of the adverts
• The adverts mainly ended with a scene of just the product as to make a point of it to the viewer

After going deep into research, I decided to choose Skittles as I couldn't find an advertisement for Skittles in stop motion and the range of colours provided opportunities to work with rainbows to make a bright and eye catching advertisement. Therefore, making a storyboard to get my vision onto paper was an appropriate choice and kept my thoughts organised. It helped to remind me which scene came next and what movement the Skittles or packet were going to make.

In my storyboard, I added scenes that involved the actual packet like the researched advertisements, added a scene of food being taken like the Pringles advertisement (Pringles advertisement), made sure to make the last scene a solo shot of the packet and logo against a plain background like the researched advertisements and also tried to add movement to the skittles as if they were alive like the running man in the Kelloggs advertisement (Kelloggs advertisement).

Week Two - Day Two

Day two was the start of my filming with the Skittles so the first thing was to get the rostrum set up with the camera and lighting, of whom my tutor, Pete, showed me how to set up and how everything works.

The lighting is either side of the camera of which is pointing down to the table with the background, as shown in the photo above.

The filming was to take place on a software called "Dragonframe", a software I had never used before but was quite simple to use.

Next thing to set up were the camera settings, which Pete also managed in order to make sure I had the best quality possible when taking photos.

To make sure the camera quality was perfect, I took some test shots and made a quick animation with my phone. This helped me to make certain my camera and computer was ready to go.

Before starting, Pete gave me some advice to take two shots of each movement. He told me people prefer a choppy animation to a smooth one as a smooth animation almost looks weird. This, he said, was why Wallace and Gromit became iconic in the stop motion animation world. Pete also showed me onion framing, which allowed me to see previous frames only slightly. This helped me considerably in making my next moves in the animation and became extremely useful throughout the whole process of the stop animation.

Problem One

Whilst filming, I had to come to a stop as I ran out of red coloured skittles to finish my rainbow explosion.

How did I problem solve?

That evening, I went to the shops and bought another packet. This meant I had plentiful Skittles and I was not going to run out of a certain colour as I continued filming the next day.

Upon reflection, I should've made this a risk and considered this as I was buying the first packet. If I were to make a similar stop motion animation with food, I will definitely consider this to be a major risk in the future. This was a good learning experience.

Week Two - Day Three

On day three, I finished all of the scenes that needed to be filmed. When looking back through my animation after every scene, I was thoroughly pleased with the rainbow scene as I thought this turned out really well. Then, I exported my animation to my OneDrive as I was going from monitor to monitor.

Before i got started with editing my scenes, I first found some upbeat music off Pixabay inspired by the upbeat music in the researched advertisements.

Pixabay is a very reliable and resourceful website as it offers a range of music, photos, videos and much more that aren't copyright material. This ensures my work doesn't have the risk of being copyrighted.

Following this, I found the packet and logo through Google to photoshop in order to become an asset for After Effects. I needed to photoshop these photos so they had a clear background and wouldn't overlap in the editing process.

These, I edited on Photoshop. I have used Photoshop many times before and used the same process to clear the background as I did for The Simpsons title sequence the week before, so this process was a lot smoother now that I knew what I was doing.

The process of removing the background is as follows:

1. Go to remove background
2. Click on the 'Modify mask feather and density" option
3. Click "Select and mask"
4. Click on the "Quick selection tool" which allows you to either add or remove from your selection (the red)

After doing this to both photos, I was ready to put everything together.

First, I added my stop motion mp4 to Premiere Pro to repeat the scene of the rainbow explosion 3 times for a bigger effect and to add the music. I also wanted to make some scenes quicker as they were quite slow in the original stop motion, such as the first scene of the packet coming onto the screen. To repeat the scene of the explosion, I added the mp4 to my sequence 3 times and cut the scene out so it was separate from the whole mp4. Then, I placed the scenes one after the other. This turned out to be quite effective and worked really well for the finished product.

Secondly, I exported and transferred the edited video into After Effects so I could add the assets (the packet and the logo). The packet I wanted to have a bouncing animation onto the screen so it had some movement and caught the viewers eye. I did this by adding keyframes and messing with the scale (S) option, to then adding "Easy Ease In" to my keyframes for a smoother animation. The logo, however, I wanted to experiment with to hopefully expand my knowledge on After Effects. On After Effects, I started to look through the presets of what I could add to my assets to give it some animation and movement by dragging presets onto my asset to see what it did to the asset. Eventually, I found a preset which made the logo look like it was painted on which I thought to be brilliant and worked really well with my edit. So, I dragged the preset onto my asset.

Problem Two

The animation was quicker than I wanted it to be but I had no idea how to change the speed.

How did I problem solve?

Therefore, it was a case of searching up a tutorial on YouTube of which taught me that clicking on the asset, pressing U twice and making the appeared keyframes a wider distance is what slows the animation down.

Upon reflection, this was very useful to know. In the future, I would now be confident to add presets to my edit knowing now how to make them quicker or slower.

Afterwards, I rendered and exported my video from After Effects back to Premiere Pro to cut the clip down so it ended with the music.

Before I decided I was finished, I asked my tutor, Pete, to take a look at my video and see if there needed to be any improvements. His suggestions were extremely useful as he told me the colour should "pop" more if this were to be a professional advertisement. He showed me how to change the colour saturation, tint and temperature to achieve bolder and brighter colours and so I tweaked them only slightly until I got his approval that it was much better than before.

Pete taught me a lot of things during that conversation that I thought were very interesting:

• We only use Apple Macs as they make their own discs for colouring, so every colour we see on the screen should be, by theory, correct. Other companies, such as Dell or HP manufacture discs for cheap in different countries, therefore transporting screens or photos will result in different colours to what you originally viewed
• The "Lumetri Scopes" you see on the left of the photo tell you that everything at 100 is white and everything at 0 is black
• Pinpointing the "White Balance" while colour correcting changes the colours to what they, technically, should be

And so, I was finished! 🎉

Reflection

How did I find this task?

I actually found this task to be quite relaxing and rewarding, especially when making the animation. Despite it being extremely time consuming, I would definitely consider stop motion in the future. I really enjoyed it!

What did I find out/learn by undertaking this task?

As I said, I learnt just how much time stop motion can take up and how many frames it actually takes. For example, this animation took 418 frames for just 17 seconds. It made me realise just how many frames have to go into videos or even movies and the shear size of the number. I also learnt about onion framing (making the previous frame slightly transparent) which helped me find my next position or get to my original position if a skittle was accidentally knocked or if I had to repeat some scenes.

What would I do differently next time?

Next time, it would be quite interesting to try 3D stop motion, just like Wallace and Gromit, to fully make my idea come to life.

Forward Plan

Moving forward, I will definitely consider using stop motion for my assignment. After next week, I will need to decide what I liked best and what I want to avoid - this is something I loved. I will have to see what my next option is before I fully commit to what I decide to do.

The Final Product

 Let me know what you think! 😀