Filming Commercial Blog

My Individuality Experience 

   Today my class started filming the first complete project on a commercial. First thing off is that I didn’t have a group. So I did my entire commercial almost completely by myself I’ll explain the almost later. So I got in class and got all the equipment I needed  the camera, SD card, and tripod. Then after doing all the class procedures I grabbed all my stuff and headed to the first water fountain I saw. I settled down and set up the camera and tripod it was probably easy and self explanatory. I had a lot of fun playing around with the tripod and trying to figure out things that could work. Next thing I wanna mention is that doing everything alone is really hard in all honesty. It’s hard to film specific movements and angles on a subject when you are the subject. So future reference I should find a group for the next project.

   First place I went to was the water fountain. My commercial was for a water bottle company (Essentia) so the water fountain was the first to mind when I was planning everything. I did a few stationary takes on the bottle to start. I mainly did this to figure out how the camera should be set up to get the exact shots I wanted. After figuring it out I had the bottle propped up on the fountain and I took several pans and tilts of it. I filmed some of those at a low angle, some at eye-level, and a key few at a high angle. I repeated this but this time I had the water fountain water running. So the bottle was being hit with water. The only main difference between these is that for the with water I only shot at a high angle because I needed to hide my hand while I was turning the water on. All these takes will made up for about 3 of the 6 boxes or 15 of the 30 seconds of the commercial.

   The next location was the media center staircase. This is where I had most of my problems in filming. I need to take a few takes of me and I got a few one but they were all stationary and I needed a take of me drinking the water and incorporate a tilt with a low angle in it. I just needed someone to move the camera up and down for a few seconds. Luckily a friend of mine passed by and he helped me out with that take and another of me pouring the water on myself to give the impression that it ”cools” me off. Honestly wasn’t my best decision and obviously I needed to do it like 3 times to make sure I had variety if needed and basically just soaked myself. I only needed to shoot one more scene and it was just a simple stair run. So I propped the camera on the top of the stair case and run up and down a few times in different take. My only worry is I never really saw how much the camera actually got so I might get messed up I say the thumbnail when I was dumping the film and I saw myself clear. My last last thing to do was record myself saying the slogan on the water company so that I can make it a voiceover in the final product through editing. Which will be next up.