#MediaMonday: The Fast Smartphone Ad
Good Morning everyone,
Our first pop-up is going live this morning with 31 teams competing! What a great start to the season. Please keep an eye on these emails, our socials and on studenttelevision.com for upcoming contest dates.
If the beginning of your year is anything like mine, you are often looking for assignments that are accessible and readily available. Like it or not, the unfortunate thing about the beginning of the year is that there is a lot of dead time leading up to bigger assignments. These are the moments when you need your students getting practice but they often are not ready to take one of your larger cameras and go shoot.
I have started thinking of these special lessons as "Pocket Lessons".
The philosophy of a pocket lesson is simple: what does a student have in their pockets and backpacks that they can use to create a media project?
In the interest of still encouraging students to create assignments that are real-world applicable and grounded in the reality of the production world, I have a pocket lesson that I would now like to share with all of you called The Fast Smartphone Ad.
Here is the link to the lesson plan.
Since many phone companies like to brag about their camera's capabilities, they often shoot (or claim to shoot) the commercials on their own phones. This assignment creates a scenario where students are challenged to do this same type of ad with their own phones.
I always encourage students to edit on what they have (WeVideo, iMovie, DaVinci, etc), keeping the assignment accessible and simplified when it comes to instructional time.
I recommend trying this lesson out. It not only gives students limiting parameters (which is exactly what a client does to production companies) but it also allows the students to set a standard for themselves at the beginning of the year. It also lets you quickly judge what you are working with when encountering a new batch of students for the first time.
Let me know how it goes and I will talk to you soon,
Josh Cantrell