Christmas Advert Evaluation

 

I believe the ad we created came out amazingly well. Geoffrey, Bailey, and I are all very happy with it and the process of how it came to be.

We were very lucky to be given permission to film at Geoffrey’s house. In fact, when Bailey and I arrived it was clear that this would be an excellent place to film. All the Christmas decorations would only add to our production, and we set up the dinner table ready for a Christmas dinner. Geoffrey’s mam had even set up some food that we could use. The first scenes we shot were those that were outside. Everything ran like clockwork, Bailey had everything planned and talked us through which shots we were filming. These scenes included ones where we were running, searching behind trees and gravestones and a couple where we looked to be talking to each other frustratedly. These scenes worked out really well, the weather stayed dry for once! Bailey was very clear and organised in his direction and Geoffrey and I worked hard to make sure performed well and worked with the time we had. Due to filming in December we had to be aware that it becomes dark very quickly and that we have a limited window to film. Therefore, it was imperative that we filmed outside first in order to have enough daylight to film by. To film these scenes Geoffrey and I put ourselves in our characters shoes. We had to imagine we had lost our dog and as we have both owned dogs in the past, we channelled how we would feel in this situation. This is how Geoffrey came up with the idea of him becoming angry in one of the scenes and how my instinct would be to calm everyone down. I don’t like to feel worried and so I would try to be calm and collected in times of stress. This created a good dynamic for Geoffrey and me to portray how different people react to certain situations.

 

 

The next scenes to be tackled were the ones with the ‘Grandad’, which is actually played by Geoffrey’s Stepdad. Geoffrey’s stepdad filmed his scenes with great success. He listened to what we and Bailey needed him to do, took it all in and off he went. Geoffrey’s stepdad had never acted before, and I think that may have actually helped as he did not overthink or overdo his scenes. Sometimes I find that as an acting student that we on occasion over act or overthink our own scenes as we want to do our best. That is something I have learnt over the course of our acting course, to try not to overthink while acting because it can seem fake to the camera and audience. Nevertheless, everything went well and it was wonderful that Geoffrey’s stepdad was able to do this for us. We could not have filmed our Christmas advert without him.

The final scenes to be filmed was mine and Geoffrey’s reaction to the dog going missing. We had to go back to our previous state in the scenes we had already filmed, worried. Yet we also had to bring a lot more confusion to the scene as we reacted to being told the news and not being as worried as we would be in our later scenes. This is how we started to develop our performance in this piece, so that we were showing all the different sides and emotions of our characters. We didn’t just want to film our performance we wanted to also develop our skills at the same time.

Throughout our filming process we tried to use the different stages of emotions that you traditionally see in a John Lewis advert. To have a beginning, middle and an end to the piece. We wanted to follow that same structure and I believe we did so successfully. When we were researching other Christmas Adverts, we noticed that John Lewis tends to do silent adverts. This brought up a chance to push ourselves in a different way, to highlight all our story telling solely through body language and facial expressions. Once again, I feel that we did a good job to put this across the screen to our audience. I thought acting wise it was a good chance to work on emotion portrayed by using only facial and body langue as this is something I wanted to focus on anyway. I needed to show a lot of distressed emotion and eventually change that to calm and focused when my friend got very emotional and angry. This allowed me to show a greater range of emotion than my previous roles have allowed, and I feel this has also allowed me to grow as an actor

I learnt a lot making this advert, more so in terms of planning. We put a lot of our own thoughts, ideas, and planning into this piece. We weren’t just being told what to do, we put a lot of effort into working together in our groups. I’m really proud and happy that we did so because it made me feel as if we truly learnt from our experience with the Copycat scene. When we were approaching the filming, we all made sure to talk through each shot and what we wanted from them. Rather than just relying on our editor, I really appreciated this as it made me feel more involved in the filming. Bailey also did a great job editing the final piece and it came out really well and that the music had great timing and the shot turned out well.

Whilst I’m really proud of our work on this production I definitely think we could have improved upon somethings. I believe that the ad would have been more impactful if we had more actors to play a larger family that was looking for a dog for their grandfather. This is something to think about for future projects, to make sure we had a larger group to start off with and offered up roles for others to have. Overall, we all worked really hard on this project, and I am proud of our final product.