SportCraft Commercial

The creative process that went into this commercial was a fun one. I played around with different ways to create a fun commercial that was only 30 seconds long. I knew pretty much from the beginning that I wanted to do some sort of small spoof on the real serious sports ads that Nike and Adidas run a lot. I batted around a few different ideas of how to promote their shoes in fun ways, but in the end I just couldn't get over this idea. I knew it would be too irresistibly fun.

Once the idea was in place, I had to obviously start coming up with exact ideas and writing the commercial. Once again, I batted around a lot of different ideas, whether or not to use actors to be playing the game for shots or to just use pans and such of the general layout. In the end I thought about the real serious commercials I was trying to parody and remembered that typically they use a lot of images and footage without actors to really set the mood of intensity. So, I went that route as well. Then came the writing process. I had to figure out exactly what shots I wanted in the commercial and what I wanted to VO to be. I think in the end, the ideas were definitely solid and the VO is a nice addition to the commercial, although I would have preferred to get someone else to do the VO so it wasn't my voice, but oh well, Indy doesn't have a large market for voice actors.

I think in the end the commercial came out pretty well. Right off the bat, I know the main weakness of the project is the low light and difficulty to see everything on screen. This was a problem that came up due to a bit of a lack of planning on my part. I knew I wanted the lighting to be authentic so I scoped out the location ahead of time and decided that the lighting would be sufficient to produce a good piece. However, the one thing I did not account for happened. Apparently, cameras in general, or just the one I rented from our technology department, do no mix well with blacklights. And since the area of my shooting was lit primarily by blacklights, I was in trouble. I tried many different ways to still use the light from the blacklights, but it just would not work out. For some reason, anytime the camera was focussed in on an area lit strongly by blacklights, the camera would pulsate in and out of focus, it was quite the dizzying appearance. So, in the end I had to use the rest of the light from the room and not the blacklights. So, I guess that hurt a bit. However, even without the best lighting I still like how the project came out. The VO turned out quite nicely and adds well to the spoof of the commercial. Also, I like what I was able to come up with for the tagline scene at the end. It's not quite up to par with the people who do this for a living, but hey, I'm still learning the programs a bit too and am enjoying the chance to work with them. All in all I enjoyed the process, shooting, and editing of this project and look forward to debuting it in class.

Enjoy.