Sunday, December 12, 2010

Video Commercials -- Choice Session 2

On December 4th and 11th, one choice session was a unit on making video commercials, giving the students a chance to learn something about the art of advertisement. It was good to see that we had an almost 100% attendance, considering the weather, and everyone was bright-eyed and ready to get some video editing done!

We started with a brief primer on advertising concepts, with the students learning about brand recognition and the necessity of economy of information. Commercial makers don't have a lot of time to get their point across to an audience, especially due to cost to buy air time, so we really wanted to enforce a strict time limit on their projects. We followed the lesson with some examples of famous commercials, including the 1979 Mean Joe Greene Coca-Cola ad and the 1984 Macintosh commercial. We talked about the specific principles involved in each ad--what worked, what didn't, what kind of effect the commercial had, etc.

Here's the Coca-Cola ad:


And, the Mac ad:


With all of this information to arm them, the students launched into their projects. To leave enough time for the 11th Annual Holiday Luncheon, the morning session had twice as much time as the afternoon session did, so the afternoon session was really under the gun when it came to their work.

As a result, the morning session went a little higher on concept, with a lot of recording being done, but not a lot of editing. The afternoon session performed with flying colors, all three groups finishing their project by the end of the class. Yay for them! Impressive work!!

Here are the projects that the afternoon class completed:







Great work, everyone!