Filming the commercial

Today we filmed the commercial. I had a great time with my friends, and it really was a great learning experience. We all learned how to do one useful skill, either filming or acting. Our commercial took a more comedic approach to advertising, which I think was a good move because the best way to capture the hearts of young people is to make them laugh. I went and bought props to make the person eating Wendy’s look cool in contrast to the people eating boring food. It worked perfectly. In contrast to the other two actors, I was probably the coolest looking person on the patio at that time.

We only had an hour to film and ten minutes to dump our footage onto the computers, so it did have an air of urgency while we filmed, but that did not stop us from having fun. The person who was filming started out poor at handiling a camera, but his skill increased drastically and he got much better as a whole through the filming time. The same was true for the actors, as our line delivery got less and less amateurish with every time we had to redo the shot. During the filming, our team employed different angles to spice up our commercial and subsequently our filming. Just some of the angles we used were Dutch tilt, handheld tracking shot and zoom in, among many others.

Our commercial tried to break many conventions of the classical Wendy’s commercial. We break the fourth wall many times to connect with a viewer on a more personal level. This approach may allow corporate to sell more chicken nuggets, much to our joy. All in all, it was a fantastic project that I will love doing again. It taught me a lot about the filming process, how the storyboard interacts with the filmers and how important camera placement is and angles. To spice up our commercial, ha ha, it took a lot of thought. But in the end, it was worth it because when we dumped our footage, we strung it together and it looked really good without editing so I can only imagine what it will look like with all the special effects and zooms. I am very excited to see the final product.