Week 3 - Media

Filming an advert

On 27th September our class was doing a Carousel where we were having a go at different subjects. Today we was working with the media department and had a task of making an advert about a BIC pen and why this BIC pen is better than your average ball point pen. We were put into small groups first and we all had to come up with an idea on how we could advertise this BIC pen. Me, Chloe D and Jada were in a group; our idea was about a small girl who loved colouring and she had all these coloured pens and was also losing them and found it frustrating having to switch to different coloured pens. Then her mum buys her this 4-colour BIC pen and all her troubles are solved and she's happy.

As a class we had to decide who had the best idea and we all chose group 2 who was Henry, Heather, Yasmin and Josh. There idea was based in a class room and when the colours on the BIC pen were clicked the people around him would faint.   

Once we chose who's idea to create we had to deicide each others roles to film the advert. I had the role of recording and stopping the advert. The camera's were completed by Alex, Ian, Yasper and Stephan. Jada was the floor director - her role was to tell those in the advert what to do, she kept everything running safely. Heather was the main director who was in charge of everything. Tom and David were in charge of lights while Eden was in charge of sound. Chloe D was in charge on making the script while Matt and Cyndie were controlling the music and volume of sound. Jade was controlling the choice of cameras to create the advert - she had to switch from 4 cameras while the advert was being filmed to capture all sides of the advert. The main actors who performed the advert was Henry, Yasmin, Josh and Meghan.  

Filming the advert it took us about 5 attempts because the communication skills weren't great and the team work wasn't there. When we went to start it there was always someone who didn't know how to start or there was a technical issue. We did run into our break time till we finally filmed the advert.

Overall there wasn't any issues in the advert the only issue we had as a class was team work and communication skills. This is something that made us run into our break as there was no organisation or communication between everyone. This will be something we will look into for next time.

Recording & Editing Sound

On Tuesday 26th September, we were in media with Stuart. We entered the room and sat down when he told us we were going to record a section from the film The Cat In The Hat. Me, Chloe, Tom and Lydia each had small paragraphs to say while Jada recored it. We were then told once we recored the section we used a programme called Adobe Audition where we had to edit in sounds and music to our recording.

We were put into our chosen groups and I had colour coded the text I was going to say, my colour was orange. We then went into small booths where we started to record our text. Once we recored our text we uploaded our recordings onto the computer and started to edit on Adobe Audition. We added the cat in the hat theme tune to our recording. We converted our soundtrack though the MP3 converter online. The first time the website wouldn't let us convert our soundtrack so we had to look for another website where we could convert our soundtrack safely. After sorting out the soundtrack we then chose some sound effects and experimented with our voices, so we tried making our voices sound like we was underwater. This didn't sound too great so we chose not to add in that type of sound, instead we chose to edit our voices so they sounded high pitch. We all preferred this edit and stuck with creating the tone of our voices as high pitched. 

Overall in our group we produced a clear recording from The Cat In The Hat. After editing our recording and deleting small sections where sound and laughter wasn't needed we saved our recording onto a hard drive. This lesson I found easy to understand as I did Level 2 Media last year and recording and editing in the software Adobe Premier was something I did everyday so I had great skills in the group as I knew how to work Premier Pro and helped the group to learn the basics of the software. Team work was something our group was strong at; we didn't leave anyone out and made sure everyone in the team has a section to read out and if they didn't have that opportunity they got to edit the recording. Everyone had a part. I chose to read out sections of the text so did Chloe D, Tom and Lydia. Jada preferred to edit the recording as she didn't like the idea of recording her voice, this wasn't a problem as not everyone likes talking into a recorder. Our recording was in total 3 minutes long once we completed all the editing that needed to be done.