AICE Media Studies Blog

Our commercial represents the important social issue of wearing facial coverings to control the spread of COVID 19. Most people use masks as a habit now but there are people that don’t wear masks. We found during our research for the commercial that there are several reasons why someone may not wear a mask. The reasons vary from being uncomfortable to wanting to look cool or different, or political reasons. Whatever the reason may be, it was critical that people wear a mask and stay safe during this pandemic. Masks have helped throughout the duration of the pandemic to help prevent the loss of lives to COVID 19.  Our commercial message was focused on teenagers that do not regularly wear masks. This specific topic made it easy to craft our content in a way that we felt would be relatable. We also wanted to target a younger group of people because we felt it would be easier to aim for people in our age group. Since teenagers care about how they are perceived ...

After about a month of, filming, re-filming, and editing, the commercial is finally complete. I am very relieved. Actually, I am even joyous that this commercial project is finished. I loved the whole process of making a commercial, but the editing process was difficult and frustrating. My favorite part of the project was the initial planning, storyboarding, and the actual filming.    With the planning stage, I understood what I had to do and how to complete it.    The creative aspect of these parts of the project seemed to come easy to me, which made it enjoyable. My least favorite was the editing tasks. This was probably because it was new to me and a challenging learning experience.  I felt dependent on my partner and had to keep watching everything he was doing to learn. Observing all the editing skills my partner knew was helpful and taught me a lot. I love to learn and absorb new skills but I was clumsy with the computer and software so I have mu...

In class today, my partner and I rewatched our commercial one final time. We noticed that some clips were a little too fast for the storyline. We split up the clips between us so we could each work on a better flow. Our goal was to determine which clip needed slowing down and by how much. My batch of clips was from the beginning of the commercial. Slowing down the beginning would change the whole pace of the commercial, which doesn't match the storyline. I rewatched my clips together several times before it became obvious which ones would help the commercial flow better if they were a touch slower. I experimented with the timing in a few different ways to see which way would actually help the flow. I think I tried too many options and variations of the timing on the clips because I completely messed up the commercial from the version I started with. My editing was making things worse. I realized that this was not going to help the commercial so I went to see wha...

  My partner and I finally finished filming all of the clips, so we began the editing process. We sat down in media studies and together we starting reviewing each clip we had taken through the duration of filming. As we watched, we either "favorited" the videos we liked or trashed them. After going through them all it was time for our individual work. We divided the batch of video clips for my partner & me to work on. My batch was the clips for the first half of the commercial. We want the audience to understand that our actor is a student walking into school. To give the right feel and effect to our opening scene, I wanted to add the right sound. I searched youtube for a gate opening sound until I found the perfect one and edited it to fit the time management. Next, I put each of the clips together along with the gate sound to make a rough draft with them. After there were aligned, I started to search for background music for the commercial. Since the...

Today was my group's final day of filming our commercial. When class started, we were able to go outside and start filming almost immediately, which gave us all the time we needed. Also, we were very fortunate today to have one of our classmates assist with our filming. It was a big help with two specific scenes because both my partner and I are in those shots. We learned that having an assistant makes the process go by even faster. There was a "Blooper" moment during one of the shots today. I was supposed to be handing the actor a mask to put on, but I kept on positioning my arm in a weird and awkward way that made us all laugh. It was funny to playback. I had a difficult time correcting my arm movement, so we had to record the scene a couple of times until I finally got it right. Another challenge today was our final scene shot. We had the actor walking in front of the camera while putting his mask on. We wanted to capture a smooth, quick slip-on of the mask, ...