AICE Media Studies Blog

Creative Critical Reflection 1.       How does your product use or challenge conventions AND how does it represent social groups or issues?    Although my group and I decided to use the convention of classical, calm jazz music, to the transition of upbeat, motivating music in our commercial, our product was not presented in a conventional way. My group and I decided to execute this commercial focusing more on student life, rather than the typical working adults presented in a Starbucks commercial. Since no one in my group currently has a job, this perspective of student life worked out perfectly. Everyone in my group is currently a student, so there is sufficient and collective knowledge on how students work, study and function. Knowing this information helped to make the commercial realistic and more marketable towards the demographic of students. The representation of students specifically is extremely important. The representation of students signif...

                                                  This commercial was the first effort within my group. I honestly enjoyed collaborating with my groupmates, it was definitely a learning experience. Some things I learned were that I enjoyed filming and being a camera person rather than acting and being the one filmed. Additionally that I must be realistic when storyboarding. My group and I while storyboarding decided to include a few animations to make the commercial seem more polished and professional. A few issues with this is that no one in the group had any previous experience creating animations, no one knew how to create them. When it came time to create and incorporate them into the commercial, my group and I weren't able to include them in the commercial. I would've truly preferred that my group and I were able to include them in th...

 My group and I have finally made it to the end of this project. I have finished editing the commercial and to be honest, it was an experience. Everything from shortening the clips to layering the audio alongside clips, to trying to make the commercial look as smooth as possible was honestly difficult but worth it. Although the commercial doesn't look as professional as I would've hoped, it is also my first filming project, from start to finish. I believe for the first attempt at a filming project as a group, my group and I did very well. There were definitely a few issues my group and I ran into whilst filming. These issues would include not being able to use certain transitions I had planned to use beforehand and the audio for certain clips not working at first. Another problem my group and I had run into was when I had exported the file to share with the rest of my group, there were certain clips that had audio that would not play. This was obviously an issue since I could n...

 Today, my group and I began to edit our commercial. At first, I deemed editing as a very difficult task, an almost daunting one. However, after researching and watching tutorials on how to correctly edit on iMovie, I finally started to get the hang of it. Sabrina and I clipped all the shots together on iMovie and inserted transitions in between the clips. Originally, our film, without any transitions, was 37 seconds. I had to cut down the time, due to our time constraint being 30 seconds. I cut a few clips down, which made the film look a bit choppy, but with transitions and further editing, it should be good. Now, the film is at 27 seconds, including transitions. My group and I were also able to record the voiceover, for the Starbucks logo at the end of the film. Celine was able to do this portion. In a previous blog, I had mentioned my group and I were planning to do an overlap of a certain clip and the Starbucks logo at the end of the film. Unfortunately, I don't believe I have...

Hello! Today we had to redo a few shots because of a few imperfections. These imperfections being the camera being a bit shaky and the lighting being wrong. After we had reviewed the clips filmed by Sabrina, we realized we also had to refilm a few shots because there were people walking in the background. While we would've liked this, as it would give our commercial some authenticity, it just didn't look right. We instead decided to have Celine walk in the background. I touch on this more in detail later on. However, this was more successful in making Celine look like another student on campus.  Additionally, there were a few inconsistencies with my movement and the timing of certain things that had to be fixed. For example, the timing of the sandwich being "dropped" onto the table had to be adjusted accordingly. There were quite a few people also filming the previous time we filmed and today. Although we didn't have to use our backup plan, it was still a bit diff...