#MediaMonday: The Drink Commercial
Good Morning Everyone,
In addition to film and journalism, I teach another interesting class. It's called CP Media Productions and it was a class that we wrote for our school through the career program of International Baccalaureate. Basically, it is a freelance media production course. It bas become a great place for some of our more ambitious students to bone up on a variety of additional skills such as lighting, color grading, and compositing.
Every year in CP Media, we have a reoccurring assignment that the kids always look forward to and have a great time completing. Since many of you only have a little over a week left, I thought I'd share an assignment with you all that is easy to drop into your current media curriculum.
So today's lesson is: The Drink Commercial
For this assignment, students will be shooting and editing a fake drink commercial for a real drink brand. You can decide how you want to assign drinks or let students choose their own. Obviously, you'll have some cute little knuckleheads that will try to pitch beverages that is beyond their age bracket. In that event, just remind them to stay classroom-appropriate (and also remind them how stupid a 17 year old sounds when trying to act cool and old).
Warmup:
What I found to be a super-effective way to begin this lesson is by showing a video of a pro doing the same thing. Hypocritically enough, the video that I show is for a beer commercial. Again, remind the kids that beer is evil and to pay attention to the skills.
A video by the guys at Indie Mogul: How To Shoot A Commercial | 9 Easy Steps to Film
Assignment:
At this point, I assign the base assignment with some rotating accommodations. Here is the basic assignment:
A client has approached you about a drink commercial for a commonly-known beverage to appear on social media and make a TV run as well. This client wants this commercial to:
Be shot in color, but must be highly stylized
Feature the beverage being poured into a rotating glass at least once
Feature a catchy slogan that can be spoken/displayed/or both at the end of the commercial
Be around 30 seconds in length
And then, normally, I throw in a curveball. Those might include:
Must include a Canted Angle
Must include only moving shots
Must include a slow-mo shot of the beverage
Must include a shoot of someone enjoying the drink
Must adopt a 1970s aesthetic etc.
I have a no copyright music policy in my program so I don't let students set their commercial to anything except royalty-free music and sounds.
I do allow students to show the brand of their product since we don't publish these online and it would be nearly impossible to complete the assignment without it.
Follow-up:
After the assignment is completed, I have the entire class watch every commercial and give their critique.
For critiques, I stress that collaborative criticism makes all of them stronger media producers.
For each commercial, students give a positive (+) and a Room For Improvement (R.F.I.) aloud
The Final Submission:
Since this class is designed to mimic freelance media production, we always allow students to revise and resubmit based on "client-feedback" as they would in the real world. This is a great way for students to see exactly what they want on-screen and to learn the value of setting personal standards.
Here are a couple of examples from my students:
I hope this gives you a spare idea for this week (or even later in the year) and enjoy watching your students' commercials!
Talk to you soon,
Josh Cantrell