AICE Media Studies

Creative Critical Reflection 1.       How does your product use or challenge conventions AND how does it represent social groups or issues?  Conventions are the typical scenarios that occur in media products. Our commercial, on Jan-sport backpacks, challenges the regular conventions of a typical, joyful, product oriented, commercial.  Instead we have decided to combat the issue of bullying and bring awareness towards the subject. Our commercial begins like a stereotypical backpack ad, with students at school, but within the first few scenes, there is an issue. One student is unable to zip up their backpack, so fellow classmates come together and give the poor student his very own Jan-sport backpack. I chose to include this scene in order to set an example and to teach other students how to treat people. 2. How does your product engage with audiences AND how would it be distributed as a real media text?  My product  engages  with audiences bec...

 My Commercial I am happy to have completed my first AICE project, and to have learned many new, important film making skills. Allison has taught me acting skills, and I have mastered many angles and transitions to improve our commercial. I can take these skills with me throughout my life and use them in different aspects. Allison and I enjoyed working together and learning from each other. I can see us doing more projects together in the future. I am very proud of the work that Allison and I accomplished, and I am happy with the outcome of our first ever commercial. When we first began I did not know much about filming or producing, but within just a few weeks I have been able to learn and even make my very own commercial with Allison. There are a few aspects that we could work on to improve our work and efficiency, for instance, my group needs to accomplish staying on task. Nevertheless, we still created a great commercial and had an enjoyable time doing it. Overall this was a gr...

  Today my group and I finished editing our commercial! I was able to complete a lot of work on the commercial the prior week, and all that was left for my group and I to do was the music. Allison, my group member, went on YouTube and started searching for non-copyright music. She played some options and I helped her narrow down the favorites. I went on I-Movie and added the songs to the commercial one by one. Allison and I listened to the music and watched the commercial, we decided which song fit best for the tone we were trying to display. We started off with an upbeat happy song, I thought this would go well with our Jan-sport ad. However this did not make sense for some scenes, such as the one with the frustrated actor throwing his supplies on the ground. I thought it would be best to search for less cheerful music and instead something calming. Allison added the calm music to the commercial and I decided whether or not it fit. It did not. The calming music made the commercial...

 My group and I began to work on editing today, the 6th. We used an app called IMovie to create our commercial. I took charge and began putting the scenes together. Once all the scenes were in order, I noticed that our commercial was only 29 seconds long. I knew this was too short, because our commercial is supposed to be over 30 seconds. I went back to really analyze the scenes to see which one could be slowed down in order to make our commercial longer. I decided that the backpack handoff scene would be best slowed down and that it would better our commercial by adding dramatic effect to that scene. This worked out perfectly in the end because it made sense for our commercial and helped us to achieve the time goal. I also had to crop the final scene where all of the actors are walking away. This may seem counterintuitive as we were trying to make the commercial longer, but I explained to my group that the commercial would look much better and neater if we trimmed the duration of ...

 Filming Blog: Senior Patio On Monday, October 4th, I began filming again with my group. On our first day of filming we had finished 3 scenes, but when we came back to school on Monday to finish we hit a bump in the road. We forgot to wear the same clothes as the last day we filmed! As the director I should have informed my actors to bring the same or similar clothes to the ones they wore in the scenes we had already shot. My group and I ended up having to reshoot our whole entire commercial from the very start. This was a learning experience and we hope those hoping to make commercials will be sure to avoid this mistake. Everything worked out for the best, because I was able to perfect the angles after shooting the second time around. I believe that my directing skills were better on our second day of filming compared to the first. Thankfully my group and I did remember to bring our props, the Jan-sport backpacks. I began shooting by setting up the Jan-sport backpack in a perfect ...