Self reflection essay

The advert that I'm making is advertising a product from Big Babol, the plot of the advert is essentially about trying to describe the imagination of a child and how it has limitless potential to imagine just about anything, for example flying to the moon using chewing gum. 

How does your product use or challenged conventions and how it represent social groups or issues? 

My advert supports the idea of having a child be child like, this is because we are taken in to his mind throughout the advert. When he starts chewing the gum we can see that he imagined himself flying to the moon with the bubble from the bubble gum which shows his childishness and imagination.

Thus far I have followed the rules of an advert featuring a child actor lead which is to make him act childish, give him huge amounts of creativity and make him full of energy, also in addition to all that I made him appear short in shot number 2.1 by making him only half the size of the door. Another thing to mention is the overall theme of the advert, it is mostly colorful just like most candy adverts in the world should be and features a pink candy store, because being colorful with your advert shows the signs of the product being for kids (most of the time) because if the advert is colorful children would be interested (that's how most people think) and so that's why I made my advert colorful and featuring the moon, because who doesn't want to go to the moon and especially children, children would love to go to the moon.

The audience that is advert represents is obviously children both boys and girls. This is shown with the pink candy store that includes a variety of different colored candy and that fact that the candy store is pink, this factors in to a children's way of thinking like for example when they are coloring in a coloring book they would always make everything a different color, and I think a lot of children can relate to the brightly colored candy store. Another thing here that appeals to children is the moon, the moon is a pretty fascinates a lot of children and when they find out that they could one day visit it makes them want to go there, so in this advert we make the child land on the moon itself which connects with the first dream for (most) children. Lastly is describing the imagination of the child lead of the advert, this is due to the fact that his imagination is wild which can connect to a lot of children with pretty similar imagination scale. So with all that said I have not subverted at all and in fact have enforced the idea.

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media?

I have targeted children for this advert because I know that candy resonates with children and bubble gum counts as candy. By advertising a colorful piece of candy and making the advertisement as energetic as humanely possible, children would be more interested into watching the advert and would also most likely spread it to their friends.   

My advert's audiences is again children and had been specifically designed in a way that would be very appealing to youngsters. By having it so that the entire advert is very colorful it would have increased chances in attracting the attention of your kids because children love brightly multi colored things such as a bright pink candy store full of candy. Another reason why it is targeted to children is that fact that it is a bubble gum advert and kids find bubble gums to be very fun, entertaining and satisficing.

My advert would commonly be advertised on TV channels at 7-8 am in the morning and advertised again during after school times such as 2pm-7pm at night, this is because children would usually watch tv (says Mr. Nick) before school which would be the perfect time to advertise the advert to them since they would definitely see them and have to choice but to watch the advert, and same thing at the after school periods, when they go to watch TV they would see the advert and be intrigued to buy the product. The advert would be advertised in popular kid's channels such as Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Disney, Disney XD, etc.

My adverts utilizes the way in children view candy, most children see can candy in the media as delicious and colorful and so I took that as an advantage and portrayed candy the way that they view it, while I was doing this I have inadvertently used the Uses & Gratification theory. Another theory that was used in this was the "Barthes 5 codes" theory here are some examples of that 5 codes in my advert.

Hermeneutic (HER) :

• Where are we?
• Why can this kid fly with just bubble gum?
• Why can this kid breathe on the moon?

Proairetic (ACT) : 

Boy approaches candy store > he enters the store > he buys the gum > he exists the store > he opens the wrapper and starts chewing the gum > he blows a bubble > the bubble get bigger and begins to lift him into the air > after sometime he finally exists the atmosphere > he then starts approaching the moon > he lands on the moon > has fun on the moon > eats and blows another bubble gum > the bubble pops and he's back in the parking lot > it was all in his head.

 Semantic (SEM) :

the color Pink - symbolizes the existence of a candy store to help better identify the store as a candy store, also associates with the color of the gum.

Symbolic (SYM) :

The adds will shows a worker that looks pretty tires in comparison to the energetic kid.

Cultural (REF) :

This is actually inspired from another Big Babol advert so most Indian viewers would get the flying with the gum reference.

How did your production skills develop throughout this project? 

When I first started this project I thought to myself "It can't be that bad...right?" and I was completely wrong, upon learning that I had to draw the project by hand I was doubting myself a lot and when I presented my first draft it was not good enough to be a first draft so I very much worried but, over the courses of these last few days from the deadline I feel that I can finish the project, in fact my drawing has gotten a bit better, I learned how to use blog spot, also I' am getting the hang of analyzing and making  adverts.

Well speaking of the first draft, there were somethings that I had to change from the original one. First of all changing the convenience store into a candy store, then I added a new expanding bubble shot/scene and finally I could decide on a brand which means I can get rid of the "brand bird" (I made the brand bird to fill in the blank space in the brand department) and the final change to the story board is the addition of a new character which is the soulless store clerk.

To put it bluntly, my advert has evolved to something I made up randomly while I wasn't paying attention in class which has no meaning and a non-sensical plot, to something that conveys some sort of meaning to a younger audience and a small reminder to adults of their childhood.

I feel that I've gotten better at using BlogSpot in particular because I can now comfortably make blog and post videos on it without getting lost, but haven't mastered the use of the website yet, for example I still can't get the sorting feature working as of writing this essay.

How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware and online - in this project?

The advert was possible only through the uses of several software such as BlogSpot, YouTube, Discord, WhatsApp and Google. I used BlogSpot to get some examples of other story boards so I can get an idea on what I have to highlight in my story board, Google was for more research on other people story board examples and for advert related research, WhatsApp and Discord is to get advice from my friends and finally YouTube is used for me to watch gum adverts so I can add some of the element into my story board. After using all of these different types if software I have saved a lot of time on the planning phase of my advert and had saved me the pain of finding my own idea from scratch, I have also gained more experience in using my BlogSpot.