10¥

Yesterday was the first ever project slam at VFS. Arriving at 8:30 am, we had no idea what was going to happen except that we would need to produce a commercial and we would need to do it fast.

First off, we were given our assignment; to develop a 30-second commercial for a company called “Body Reach.” The problem Body Reach had was that due to a production glitch, one of their vitamin supplements had no vitamin C included. While not instrinsically harmful, the flitch caught the eye of the media and was turned into a more major issue, threatening the company’s brand. As a result, the company needed to run an “mea culpa” campaign to apologize for the mistake, try to re-establish trust in their brand and win back customers.

Then, we were broken into our teams of four or five consisting of students from dd07, dd08 and dd09. I happened to be in one of the few groups that had 5; three dd09 students, myself and one dd07. It was all rather exciting and good to get going on.

In our first meeting, we worked to get the commercial idea planned out and then sketched. As it turned out, I ended up concocting the solution that the team really liked. We would play off of the idea of not being able to get the vitamin C into the pills with shots of a guy trying to get a large orange into a pill bottle. Wrapping around it would be the company president explaining about how it seemed strange that vitamin C didn’t get into the product and upon investigating, finding employees trying to shove the big oranges in. The kicker at the end would be the president saying, “we figured out how to solve the problem; smaller oranges!” at which point he holds up a tiny orange.

The concept and such we felt was rather good. Unfortunately our production had a lot of issues. To start with, for some reason the camera didn’t record audio while we were shooting. This could have been somewhat disasterous, but we were extremely lucky to have been recording with a small, portable voice recorder that was on set primarily as a prop. As it were, the syncing of audio to video consumed a bit of time and ultimately wasn’t perfect anyways; much to our frustration. Secondly, since mandarin oranges are out of season, the orange we wanted to use for comparison didn’t really seem small enough. It was suggested that we try using kumquats since they look like oranges and are tiny, but none of the three stores we went to had any. All in all, that was rather frustrating. Finally, we only had access to the audio room from 12-1 and 4-5, which wasn’t nearly enough time for us to really get the audio cleaned up well; especially with the problem due to the camera. Watch it below:

In the end, the project went decently well. Sadly, it isn’t perfect and the audio issue still bugs me, but we made it in 8 hours so tis something to be proud of. Ultimately, our commercial didn’t win either of the two prizes, but it was still a fun activity to be a part of. That and a rather tiring one!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Motion, Work Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.