Promotional Video Evaluation

Evaluation

Overall I would just like to say that personally I believe this topic has not been one of my easier tasks during my HNC, I really struggled in focusing and understanding a lot of the topic and a lot of the course as due to the corona virus we were working essentially from home which I found extremely hard as we weren't allowed in college and contacting teachers online for me was challenging.

I think everything in my promotional video could be improved, from research, idea's, a lot of the analysis of it all. i felt a bit out of my comfort zone with not having teachers around to ask when I would be stuck on little things, I would refrain from messaging and asking simple questions which I would not be hesitant in asking in a teaching environment. I feel like I went extremely off task through the past few months and almost lost myself so I found that it was really hard for me to work normally when everything around me wasn't i suppose normal. I would normally thrive in these sort of creative tasks as from a lot of the other topics, e.g music video, film studies, contextual studies etc, a lot of the other elements of the course I have exceptionally excelled at. I don't particularly like any work i have produced from this topic and if i was to do it again I would change near enough everything. I believe my analysis is strong for general videos and probably my strongest point in the whole promotional video topic.

The main unit I was given the task of planning a main promotional video from a startup company 'Fruit Bowl-Tech', they gave me the task of creating a promotional video for their company which was based around an ancestry type connecting app which gained money and profit due to the amount of sign ups the app had as it was completely free and would have no 'in-app purchases'. The audience targeted was 24-60 which I feel is a slight too big range as I feel an app regarding 30+ may have been a bit better. The company gave me a main brief and had basically asked me to plan the whole thing from location to actors to visuals and editing. I feel the task was very overwhelming.

The first element i was given from the brief was to include 4 promotional videos and get deeper meanings from seeing what general promotional videos are like, for this task I specifically chose a wide range of videos so that i could understand them a lot better. For my first video I chose The ' J'adore Dior' which depicted a classic perfume advert which gave me basics into brand identity and star image by using Charlize Theron, a very well known actress whom created a big star icon and massive hype for Dior. In this sense I couldn't in fact incorporate this type of brand identity as the brand I was given were unknown and I was basically given the purpose to 'make them big' with a relatively small budget and just one promotional video, unfortunately it would've been impossible for me to get an actor or actress on them sorts of levels to work for me, however it was good to analyse to understand that brands get to that level where they don't even need to try they can just stick a big name to the brand and be done with it, the sort of no branding in a sense becomes the brand because every women will be very aware of what the brand Dior is. Next video I analysed was the Audrey Hepburn Galaxy Advert which used mainly editing to depict a well and alive Audrey Hepburn, one of the most famous actress's in British history which again have that same branding as Dior, they don't need to show the product off a lot because they know whatever video they produce they will ALWAYS have fans of their products. They give a kind of nostalgic sense and by using Audrey creates massive brand identity and star image just there too. The third advert I analysed was The John Lewis advert, here I found that they create a sentimental meaning and less brand identity, rather get you emotional and hyped up for christmas which ultimately makes you think of John lewis and the adverts that are every year so different and well made to make you in your feelings. The last advert/promo video I analysed was the animal crossing advert, here I found they used a lot of gameplay rather than using any voiceover as it created a big interaction with the fans and a massive enigma into what the game will be like, in the advert you saw little snippets of the game to come which creates big hype in the animal crossing community fans.

The next step into my Promotional video was getting research, researching into the category of consumer and target audience I was trying to appeal to, I used a focus group to try get as much information as I could regarding other people's thoughts on my own already devised plan so that I could get some general feedback before going through with it completely. This really helped me into my research findings for the end product and helped me to get a lot of my basic ideas for the video and the video's main points eg colour scheme, music, brand identity etc. My main idea was for there to be a nostalgic video where two women are in a high end supermarket and cross paths and realise they are somehow related across a long timeline and decide to connect and earn about each others family history so are depicted having a party after and the camera is just panning it's way through. A lot of my idea's were based around having a sentimental video rather than an explaining video that no-one would really remember or care about, the john lewis and galaxy adverts had their slight input here by using a narrative and creating emotion within the audience, the final part of the video would pan up to the sky and the stars would be out as constellations and all be connecting with a sort of 10 second low down into the main points of the app and what it does. I think I did a good job in trying to encapsulate this with my story board.

I feel as though I could improve a lot of elements of my promotional video topic or some just tweaked slightly to be up to my normal standard of work I believe in this particular topic I have not really risen the bar for anything.