Making a commercial

[daddog]

I teach 7th and 8th grade and was thinking about having my students (in groups of 2, 3, or 4) make a commercial selling a breakfast cereal they create. They will even have to make a cereal box for their creation and use it in the commercial. Sort of a mix between a language arts grade and an art grade. I am hoping the finished products will be good enough for me to insert into the year end school DVD. I did my first school DVD last year cutting my teeth on VS9. It was a huge success at our small school. Many of you were a huge help!

I have never done this before, but I am sure I am not the first to think of something like this. I have not researched any teacher forums for this kind of idea yet, but I will soon. I thought I would post here and see if anyone has any ideas or links to sites that might have a rubric or list of what might be required for a ¡§good¡¨ commercial. Or by chance maybe someone here has done something similar.

Anyway, thanks in advance.

[wywso0]

I've never made a commercial, but as I understand it the rules are something like:

- the whole thing must be short, about 30 secs becuase TV time is expensive

- you have to establish the scene (eg a family breakfast) very quickly, within the first 5 secs, say, in order that you can then get on with the commercial.

- you have to put over one, simple message. You don't have time for anything else.

You might like to get your class to look at a number of commercials particularly for family foods and time them, measuring things like:

- how long is the whole commercial,
- how long is the average shot
- when does the product first appear
- what's the message
- is the message delivered by voice-over or by dialogue between on-screen actors

Good luck. It's not an easy assignment.

Bill S

[lancecarr]

Another thing they could do for practice is record a commercial off the TV. Then as an exercise "storyboard" that commercal so they get to see, shot by shot, how the scenes are being put together along with music and voice over or dialogue.
Then get them to storyboard their own creations WELL before shooting starts.

[wywso0]

A few more thoughts:

You might want to try Googling "making a commercial" or "how to make a commercial". I tried these, and although I didn't pull up anything that seemed to be exactly what you want, I think it will give you some more ideas.

I fully agree with the post about storyboarding the commercial before shooting it. What I'd suggest is building the story by drawing on large post-its. That way, if you want to add another picture or shot into the sequence or to change the order it can be done easily by shuffling the other post its.

Also, when shooting I suggest you tell the director(s) to shoot more material than the minimum that the story board calls for eg shoot the same scene from different angles or change the lighting a bit.

I wish we'd done this when I was at school.

Bill S

[Black Lab]

Have you seen these: http://www.ulead.com/userstory/vs.htm

Not exactly an answer to your question, but there are links to some of those schools where you might be able to get some input.

[TDK1044]

I'm a retired TV Director. I Directed a lot of TV shows, but only a few commercials. The production grammar is the same though. The only difference is that you have 30 seconds to tell your story instead of 30 minutes or one hour.

You must storyboard each shot, and you must know what equipment is required for each shot...Tripod, handheld, filters etc. Shooting single camera, once you're lit one way, shoot all the required setups in that lighting condition. If you try and shoot in chronological order it will take you three times as long to shoot your commercial.

Have fun,

Terry