D2 Audio Visual Promo

 Introduction

In this report, I am going to justify the creation process of our audio visual promo as a whole, including the pre-production, production and post-production stages. I will give reasons as to why we took certain approaches and why we made certain decisions and I will compare our audio visual promo to the original concept document. I will include stills of our rushes (recordings from our filming) from the production stage to help visualise why we made certain decisions. 

Justify

I was tasked to create a video advertising a product of my choice which combined both visuals and audio (audio visual promo) to be released on a medium. The medium me and my group members chose was YouTube due to how it is one of the largest video sharing websites on the internet to this day; a large amount of active users on YouTube are younger generations which is our target audience (Old teenagers to young adults) meaning that it was the perfect medium to release our audio visual promo. This is because YouTube has an extremely large amount of users and it is very likely that a lot of people from our primary target audience will be able to see this. The concept document does not specify which medium, which is why we specifically chose YouTube as we believe it is the most effective platform for our audio visual promo to thrive. The audio visual promo will play as an ad before a video on YouTube plays, YouTube ads range from 10 seconds up to 2 minutes or more. However, when an ad on YouTube is too long a viewer has the option to skip it if they aren't interested. This means that we were required to make the audio visual promotion interesting from the beginning in order to keep our target audience intrigued so they don't skip it because our promo is a minute long which would give viewers the option to skip past. 

This is the initial storyboard designed for our audio visual promo. Since this storyboard was created, we have made many changes in ideas and how we want the audio visual promo to play out; this is why it is imperative to create drafts of pre-production documents, like storyboards, so you can always create another later down the line of the pre-productions stage and compare it to your initial storyboard and see what has changed. From this perspective, you can decide if you prefer your newer ideas compared to your older ones and if you want to take any inspiration from your older storyboard and implement them into your newer one to create the most effective and entertaining audio visual promo when the production stage begins. This also assists me and my team members be more prepared and knowledgeable about our own audio visual promo and what we want to create.  As you can see, this storyboard was quite simple as we did not want to close any doors at this stage by completely dedicating ourselves to a certain aspect. 

This is another storyboard we made later on in the pre-production phase. This storyboard goes into much more detail than the previous one due to the fact that our team was more aware of what we imagined for our audio visual promo and we had more ideas on how we wanted it to play out. The last storyboard primarily showcases the iPhone 12 itself and not much else, whereas this storyboard combines both the iPhone 12, the actors and a logical storyline which we believe is necessary for our audio visual promo. We wanted a narrative for our audio visual promo because we want to keep viewers interested and prevent them from skipping the advert; a storyline helps us achieve this because it gives the viewer an incentive to keep watching as they are now invested in what the actresses (Chloe and Sophia) are doing. A storyboard like this is extremely beneficial to the group as it gives all the team members valuable information for when the production stage begins. For the cameraman (Me), it informs me on what camera shots and angles are going to be featured in the video, as well as any camera movement. Furthermore, it gives me a baseline on what I need to shoot or what angles but also gives me a bit of creative freedom as I can choose whether I want to zoom in or out or change any of the camera settings like aperture or exposure to change how the shot looks. 

This is a still from one of our rushes and this perfectly evidences how we transformed and adapted our storyboard into the recording of the audio visual promo. You can see that the this shot is very similar to the first shot of the storyboard as we decided to take inspiration from our storyboard for this scene. However, you can see that the still of the recording and the drawn storyboard are slightly different, while recording I decided to zoom in much more than what is displayed on the storyboard. I did this because I wanted the spectators main focus to be on the iPhone 12 itself, by zooming in on the product and erasing a lot of the background imagery, there is not much to focus on but the phone itself which is the intention. The effect of the zoom enhances the visuals of the iPhone 12 itself and its sleek, modern design which will interest the target audience. The camera angle is the exact same as drawn on the storyboard as we believed changing the camera angle would only take the attention away from the product and onto the actress which was not our intention as the viewers are more likely to skip the ad if the product isn't being showcased and they are being made to wait to see the product. The sound in this sequence is the soundtrack that we decided to implement into our audio visual promo which is the song Massive by Drake (we have messaged him for permission due to copyright) and that is the only audio in this sequence because we lowered the audio levels of the background noise while editing in Adobe Premiere Pro. In the post-production stage, we also added a slow-motion effect to enhance the visuals and create a dramatic effect which draws the viewer in to prevent them from wanting to skip. To add to this, it also increases the amount of time the iPhone 12 is on the screen and gives the spectators more time to look at the product we are advertising in our promo. 

This is another still from one of our rushes. This shot was intended to showcase the photographic capability of the iPhone 12 in a quirky and interesting way. Once again, you can see how this shot is very similar to scene 5 shot 1 in the second storyboard but is not related to any of the sequences in the first story board. This is due to the fact that the second story board was expanded on in much detail and provides narrative and story telling that the first story board doesn't. This shot is the exact same as what is drawn on the storyboard and we did not change anything, this is because we knew when drawing the story board exactly what we wanted to film, where we wanted to and how we are going to do it. In this shot, the camera pans upwards to reveal the rest of the quote on the building as Chloe moves out of the camera's view and this is to drag the spectator's attention away from Chloe and the iPhone 12 to the quote on the wall. We believed that an inspiring quote makes the audio visual promo more positive and friendly. Furthermore, it is memorable and the viewer is likely to remember this quote for a while after watching the advert as it will stick in their head; every time they think of this quote they will remember the ad and think of Apple and the iPhone 12. This subconsciously makes them link the positive quote and the Apple brand together and it makes them think the Apple brand is a happy and good brand to buy products off in the future. To add to this, this quote is colourful and vibrant and therefore makes the advert much for fascinating to watch as it makes the promo less dull and boring. This is why we believed recording this specific building was perfect for our audio visual promo and that is why we decided to do it. 

For almost all of our shots, we used a tripod as this increases the steadiness of the camera and makes the audio visual promo more professional looking. This still from one of our rushes is the only scene where a tripod isn't used. This is because this scene uses hand held camera movement, we chose to do this because the cameraman (me) is following Chloe and Sophia (the actresses) as they walk while talking about the new iPhone 12 and it's distinctive features. 

We believed that handheld camera movement is effective here due to the fact that we need to hear Chloe and Sophia talk. If the camera had stayed static in this shot, the viewer wouldn't be able to hear Chloe and Sophia as they walk away and it would not look realistic at all. Furthermore, this camera movement adds more diversity to the audio visual promo as we have a range of different camera movements, angles and shot types.

Overall, we believe that the choices we made throughout the pre-production, production and post-production stage made our audio visual promo an effective and professional looking advertisement for the iPhone 12. We are confident that viewers will not want to skip past this advert when watching it on our chosen medium (YouTube), especially our target audience.