Unit 3/4 evaluation.

My expectations for this unit were to learn about how different audiences are influenced by
narrative, aesthetic, and audio qualities. The skills I was hoping to strengthen were filmmaking,
understanding demographics, and editing. The reason I would expect to learn these skills is to help
me create and produce a good quality and well edited short video.

Most of my pre-production was spent researching the product given and studying its previous
adverts and how it may have evolved over time. Researching target audiences and markets helped
me fully envision different ideas and concepts along with how we could generate an approach. After
that, I mainly focused on story boarding and planning out how the adverts will play out and how. The
planning helped us know/fully understand what we needed to record and edit in. The main issue I
personally had in pre-production was determining what demographic was appropriate for the idea
my group had. This little problem helped me understand that I need to fully think through how and
why the project will appeal to the demographic that was chosen. When we were coming up with
ideas, my group and I thought carefully about what our target audience would be. Our research
mainly helped us with this part, allowing us to either completely change what the
demographic/psychometric was or renew old ones.

We often split our production roles into three (primarily 2 per person) and solely relied on that person
to use their roll to the fullest. My roles were mainly actor and cameraman, this meant I had a lot of
responsibility when it came down actual production. I had to be very particular about what I did,
said, and how I portrayed the theme of the advert. Personally, I would say that it went rather well.
Everyone was very mindful of their roles and did thier best to play their part. There have been small
mistakes, however, they were swiftly taken care of, for the most part. One example being out
lighting problem with the Yorkie advert. We simply found using the rooms normal lighting was far
too dark for filming. So, what we did was set up a regular desk lamp and shining it at an angle onto
the set. We tried our best to use angle on to focus emphasise on the product with our lighting also
mainly focused on it, to further this. My role, most of the time, was either camera work or an actor,
of some sort. There were a few problems (mainly with camera angles and lighting) which, most of
the time, we were able to sort out. In the future, we could address these issues by fully knowing how
the equipment fully works. For example, we tried to use a green screen in our Kinder Surprise project
and ended up potentially ruining the whole project.

We sometimes changed an adapted our project/advert, mainly to fit more with the theme and our
targeted audience, however, it usually was not adjusted too much. Some of the shots we recorded
were unusable, the reason being, they were either too blurry/not good quality or just didn’t fit with
the production. A simple solution to this problem would be to reshoot those shots in a different way
to try and get a better result, but for the most part, they were all used in one way or another. Away
to work around these problems in the future is to always watch the footage back after recording.

My most effective project was the Quality street advert. I say this because I personally find the
camera angle, lighting and editing used really helped bring the initial idea to life. Skills that I need to
improve on/acquire are editing, audio mixing, and mood boarding, mainly so I can create a better
piece that I can be proud of and to help me further my filmmaking. I am proud of the camera work in
the Quality street advert and the minor acting in the Yorkie advert.