Sprite Commercial

Yes, I know I said this was going to be released on the 14th, but surprise. I got a few dates confused with each other, so that's why this is out a week earlier than I said. Anyways, watch it, enjoy it, and now come back here so I can give you a written behind-the-scenes and general reflection of it.

You back? Okay, let's get started.

Pre-Production

Mrs. Smith wanted to put us in groups of 2 seniors and 2 juniors, just to get us mixed and mingling together. So after a brief moment to realize that I'm actually a senior and that time really does fly for the nth time, I paired up with another senior, Maddie. And the juniors Mrs. Smith put us with were juniors Abby and Sarah. Quick moment to say that everyone I worked with is a great filmmaker and I'm really excited to continue working with them this year. So now that the Avengers were assembled, it was time to go to work.

We knew right off the bat that we wanted to do a comedy. Abby suggested it would be funny if we had a man vs. wild concept, and our actor just randomly finds our chosen product in the middle of the forest. We chose Sprite. We needed someone who could do an Australian accent, and Abby and Sarah knew two guys. We didn't think we would get either of our first choices due to scheduling conflicts, but luckily enough, we were able to get Mason.

So we divided our roles. I chose to be the script writer and cinematographer. I began writing the script. I wrote it to be loose; as more of a written concept instead of set in stone, we could change whatever we wanted based on the environment we shot in. After that was done, I sent it to Maddie so she could make the storyboard. Abby suggested we film at a trail near her Grandma's house, and we would meet there. Finally, we checked out equipment we needed: a camera, tripod, shotgun mic, and dead cat. So with everything settled, we were ready to film.

Production

So we arrived at her Grandma's house after school on a Monday. We had snacks, and I had Mason review the script before we went to location. So her Grandma drove us to the trail.

It was a little hard to make the location feel like the true outback, the vision through the camera had to narrowly avoid busy streets and buildings in the distance. It was very windy that day, so you can still hear some wind even though we had the dead cat. The sunshine we had that day also made harsh shadows, and since we had no lighting equipment, there wasn't much to do for that. But we pursued.

We changed a lot of things to the script based on environment and generally changing our mind at certain parts. Normally, that would drive me insane, but I believe we had the concept in our hands well enough to do that and have it still make sense. And when we were done, it was time to move to:

Post-Production

Abby was the editor, and she began as soon as we were done filming. She edited on her laptop, that way she could easily edit at home. I checked in a few times to see how it was going. After the rough and final cuts, she color corrected everything. Sarah knew someone with a deep voice we could have do the ending voice over. So after getting that audio file, we put it in, and had a commercial.

In Conclusion

I'm quite proud of this. It's a nice way to shake summer off and start working in video production again. It's definitely not a magnum opus of a commercial piece, but that wasn't what I was going or working for. It's just a fun little way to advertise Sprite, and it's perfectly fine to me.