37. commercial experience

Assignment: create a 30 second video commercial about yourself

IDEAS

• strut walk-barracuda
• diamonds are a girls best friend
• beyond the sea
• aint got no song
• express yourself song
• eulogy type
• just me eating different desserts
• I wanna be lenka
• Everything stops because I gotta check out a boy
• Dress up doll-split between head, shirt, and skirt- switches around
• Actual movie traILER
• BIRTHDAY- 19 years old
• Girls on film
• Sad dogs sad me
• Side effects of being with me
• Beyond the sea song
• Pink dress butterfly chair
• I dress up as different character
• Belle

PLANNING

It took me a while to come up with the idea for this project, since I secretly love film a lot and wanted this project to be really good. I experimented with the iMovie trailer templates, but wanted to still make my own film with dialogue. The day I knew I had to make the project I thought of the Visit  California commercials I used to see on air, and I thought that would be a good way to get to know me. I had to make a script of exactly what I was going to say because each cut depended on the previous line. I also had to know where I was going to say each line, because I needed different settings, and some lines required more than one people.

EXECUTION

I used my sister to film for the scenes in the house and used my neighbors for the scenes filmed at school. Most were filmed at home, and I wanted to be wearing a different outfit for each shot, but was limited by the clothes I had there. I thought it would be really funny to wear my pink nightgown in a pink chair with a cheetah print robe for the first scene because it looked very extra. I had to ask a guy I know to sit down next to me so that I could talk to him for the point of me being "guy obsessed". I only did one or two takes of each scene because I didn't mess up a lot, since my lines were so short.

EDITING

I was originally editing the video on some computer app my sister had, but it kept on messing up, so I had to go back to iMovie. I had originally wanetd to have the song "Express Yourself" by N.W.A., but the app my sister had included a song called "Sun Dream" that actually fir really well with the energy and tone of the video. I decided it was cooler to start the music at the first action of the video instead of at the very beginning. I was scared the movie was going to be too long, and I had to crop each video to start right when I started talking and end as soon as I was done. When I was editing it, I did it in the booth of my commons and I showed the video to a lot of people, and they all thought it was really cute.

DAY OF

At first, I didn't want my video shown, and I could feel myself reddening in the face just thinking about the whole class watching it. But as the class went on and I saw other people's videos, I got more confident and really wanted mine shown. When I saw "Misconceptions", I knew it was mine. The class didn't laugh that much, which was fine because it wasn't a purely comical movie, like alot of them were. A lot of the movies played mostly for laughs, and that made them favorites among the audience because when it comes to class projects most people just enjoy a good laugh. I thought my video was going to be too loud, but it was actually a little quiet, even though I turned the volume above 100% on all of the clips. The class seemed to like it, and I got three positive comments, but they were all from three of my five friends in the class. The takeaway of my film was the call to action at the end of it to "just come and talk to me" because I do enjoy making friends. I really enjoyed watching the class's commercials and everyone's different interpretations of the assignment.

TAKEAWAY

I think I might have a little bit of potential for film, and it has always been something I was extremely interested in, but too scared to pursue in part because of all the equipment it requires. It really spoke to me when we discussed in class the line between knowing good cinematography and film and being able to execute it and how frustrating that was be, because there are so many elements to consider when making films. This was extremely fun to both film, direct, and edit. I love my video and think it says a lot about my personality.

always with love, Bella Montague