Christmas Advert Pre-Production

 

Our group first came together because we had been filming a piece and as a result we were slightly late to class. Due to this other groups had already been formed and so we made a group ourselves. Originally the group consisted of myself, Geoffrey and Harley. We all came together to discuss ideas of what we could do for our faux Christmas Advert. A couple of the ideas we first talked about included friends reuniting and an older gentleman home alone and is lonely at Christmas. This all changes for him when his family do actually come to visit him.

 We found out that the idea of a grandfather had already been used in an advert from Germany that is very famous. As well as being similar to the John Lewis Christmas Advert of 2015. We then decided against this idea as we didn’t want anyone to think we were copying this advert. Following on from this line of thought we changed it to an older man with a missing dog which he tries to find to no avail. Eventually his family would go looking for the dog and bring it back on Christmas Day, ending on the scene of a family meal. With our idea stamped out we went to see our tutor, Kelly.

For this Ad to work we also needed to select a location or two to film. Due to the story line involved it was obvious we would need to film inside someone’s house. Geoffrey offered the use of his home for the production. From there were able to use his street and a nearby cemetery to film the scenes in which we would be searching for the dog. The next step was to find a film crew to film the production for us. We ended up choosing Bailey Gamble, we talked through with them the shots needed, and they helped us to plan how we wanted it to look. I am thrilled we ended up working with Bailey, we had never worked together before, but he was an incredibly hard worker and was with us every step of the way. He was amazing in organising the shots we would need and making sure we were organised in terms of equipment.

 Geoffrey and I also talked about how we wanted to make sure we had everything perfectly organised. From our previous Copy Cat Task, we had realised how important this was and wanted to make sure we had everything ready to go. From where we planned on filming, how would everyone get there, what date to start filming on and how to acquire anything we needed.  

The first thing we needed to organise was the date of our filming, ensuring every member of crew and cast was free. This ended up being 4^th December 2021, we had originally planned on the week 18^th December – 24^th to film but due to scheduling conflicts this had to change. Of course, not everything can go according to plan, when the day came to start filming, we had the small problem, that one of our actors, Harley, became unavailable. He was performing a play with the Musical Theatre Department, this scheduling conflict meant we unfortunately had to leave him out of the production. Following on from this we also needed to adapt the production to include two grandsons instead of three. This luckily wasn’t a major change to the Ad, but it was unfortunate that Harley could not be in it.