I personally found this part of the process the most difficult, as it was a challenge to find a product we all felt we could advertise effectively. After hours of brainstorming and considering all areas of advertisement, such as clothing, food, electronics and film, we had finally decided to go with food and begin the process of considering what area of food to focus on; again, this caused more decision making as a group. Finally, after having decided to create an advertisement for a milkshake, I was met with the task of researching other milkshake products to see which style their advertisements took, and whether i found this effective or not.
Having found most advertisements took on a humorous theme, and that this was the most effective to me, I decided the advert should contain some form of humour as an initial starting point. The rest of my group recognised this aspect during their market research, and it was relieving to know they all agreed. It was definitely worthwhile carrying out market research, as every advertisement needs a starting point, and I feel as though judging the success of a product based on it's advertisement offered a challenge for our group.
When creating the survey to get a rough idea of what our client would want from the product, such as specifics in the flavouring, the price and the way in which an advertisement influences someones opinion of a product. This was incredibly helpful when considered with the previous market research, as it gave our group and overall idea of what genre of audience we were catering too, and how to reflect their needs in the advertisement, but still having some fun. The only downside to doing a survey was that some of the responses were equal to certain questions, for example some said their diet was relatively healthy, but others said they were not bothered, which gave us the task of taking these responses into consideration to cater equally for each.
Product logo and story boards
It is important that every product has a logo which offers an identity and insight into what the product offers. For example, the Apple company logo is an apple with a bite out of it, which the creators say is a biblical reference to Adam and Eve with the 'Tree of Knowledge', which suggests Apple products give uses power and knowledge. We decided that our logo needed to show how our milkshake combines lots of different gourmet ingredients into one, so our colour background is swirls of yellow and orange, representing the waffles and the syrup.
Story boarding was a process which I think could've been missed out. As a group, we commonly never follow story boarding as it limits impulse creativity. However, for the sake of the blog, I took on the task of story boarding as the director in order to ensure the task was set in stone and everyone knew exactly what it was I personally expected.
Official documents
These documents included risk assessments, call sheets, content rules and copyright issues. For me, this took a lot of time to complete, as there's so many risk content rules enforced which are easily broken and need to be avoided, especially within advertisements for food. If we were accused of giving false representation of our product, risky content within the advert or product placement, then unnecessary trouble would've occurred, which means looking at advertisement guidelines is incredibly important to any project which could be viewed by the public. The rest of these documents, such as call sheets and risk assessments were important, however in my personal opinion they did not need to be completed. I understand that every project needs to have cautions enforced and specific documents for legal reasons as well as to inform a team, however it seemed pointless to our group on such a small scale production. As I mentioned, I respect this opinion can be argued, but i don't think a shooting schedule and shot list were really needed here.
