Preliminary Tasks

TV Advert:

With the TV Advert, my group had the task of creating a short advert for a bottle of water. When we got given this object, we immediately knew we wanted to do it relating to a particular sport. Originally, we wanted to do 3 different sports, involving all of us in the advert, but when we were doing the football section, with me as the actor, as realised we had enough footage and had enough to cover the whole advert.

Relating back to the bottle of water, we decided to do a football advert because we know a lot of sports players use water to hydrate them, and in this you see that I start of playing poorly, until I drink the new bottle of water, which seems to increase the performance levels. This is a positive reflection of the water because it gives off the message that the bottle of water will make you perform to a higher standard.

With an advert, we knew that they involve a lot of close ups, this is because it’s normally used to ’show off’ the advertised product. So when we made it, we decided to have a close up of the bottle of water, and my facial expressions, to show the change in performance and how my mood changes after I drink it.

Our group also added music over the top. We used to instrumental to Will.i.am ft Justin Bieber #thatPOWER. This is because it starts with a slow tempo, which matches the mood and level of football I was doing, then the pace and tempo increases because this is when I drink the water.

Overall I think that this was the best preliminary task we made, making an advert has inspired me to think about doing it for my final production because I enjoyed doing it and it seemed and easier thing to make and score a good mark on .

Documentary:

With our documentary, we decided to base it in the College as it is a convenient and an appropriate place to do it. We thought that the sports facilities were a great choice and that’s what our decision was. We started by doing the basics and getting establishing shots of the different settings and facilities. We got the running track, sports hall, gym, swimming pool and the climbing wall. This was all put together because we believed these are the best ones the College has. After we had all of these, we then got footage of people using the facilities, after that we had to get interviews, we started by getting Nick Lane, who is the gym manager. This related to the documentary very well and he gave positive feedback about how the new sports equipment has benefited the college and the public. We then decided as a group to interview someone who believed the money could have been spent on other things. This made the documentary seem fair and not unfair.

At the start of the documentary, you see Charlie Doyle receive the ball and he holds it whilst introducing it, we believed this was important as it shows that we will be talking about relevant information and it makes him  look more ‘sporty’ and he looks more professional.

I am really happy with how the documentary turned out, it looks professional and well made. I wish we had a bit longer to finish it and get the shot we missed and spend a bit more time editing and making look a bit smoother and adding more cut aways.


In conclusion, I believe doing the preliminary tasks has made me a better filmmaker and has benefited me a lot. The reason for this is because it meant we could investigate with types of shots and length of them. An example could be when we varied the shots in the football commercial when the character is doing the skill and when the character takes a shot and directly hits the cone in the goal.
I have learned that in TV adverts especially, you need quick, snappy shorts which allows it to flow better and have a quick tempo, and this is what we took into practise and used in the advert. The shot lengths are roughly a second or half a second long - this is a convention of a commercial.