Christmas Advert

                        The Making Of Our John Lewis Advert

Christmas Advert

Each winter the film students and the acting students come together to create Christmas adverts. Our task is to create a video max 2 mins 30. We aim to make them like John Lewis adverts, emotional and cheesy but overall memorable. We have to find a cover of a song that we could use. If we really can’t find a cover then we’d maybe have to ask if a preforming arts student could sing it for us.

I’m in a group with Emie, La Toya, Kadie, Josh (film), Tom (film). We’ve made our production teams name and logo. It’s called ‘In Depth Productions’. We originally thought of ‘KELS JT Productions’ because it’s a Limerick for our names and it sounds pretty cool but we eventually decided against it because it doesn’t sound very professional and it wasn’t memorable enough . So then I suggested ‘Indie Productions’ to represent how we’re independently making productions but when I told Tom he thought I said ‘In Deep Productions’ then we all liked that better because we thought it would represent us being very passionate about our productions but then we told Kelly and she said it sounded like a pornography site, which it does hahaha oops! To be honest, when Tom first suggested the name my mind didn’t go to a group of college students making jolly Christmas adverts haha. So then we told Kelly our other idea of ‘Indie Productions’ and she informed us that a massive movie company already has that name so we couldn’t use that (I’m guessing we subconsciously copied them haha). Then, spontaneously Tom and Kelly decided on ‘In Depth Productions’ and we all liked it so now that’s what we’re called. I think it’s a very cool professional name. Our ocean is a picture of the deep o wan with our name across, we tried to photoshop it into a camera lens but so far we’ve been unsuccessful but we’ll figure it out. We haven’t really decided on our vibe but when we do I’ll let you know. I’ll also add our logo when I get a picture of it :)

our story is about a young girl that’s just moved to a new college and struggles to make friends, she has a bad home life with parents constantly fighting. In attempts to drown out her lonely life she heads to the college library and started reading a book. Every single day she read that same book and sitting in her same little chair. However, she can’t stop herself from connecting to reality when she continuously sees this small group of three girls her age that love her dream life. They’re always having fun, smiling and laughing. She wishes she was part of that group. She wanted to be part of their gang so she’s be loved and appreciated but she would never dare to go over them in fear of being rejected. One night things worsened at home and she came into college lower than ever. She had no friends, no happy family to welcome her home, she felt hopeless. She reached for her book as normal but as she opened it a note fell out reading ‘Come sit with us? one small act of kindness ,<3’. She looked around to see who left the note or if it was even meant for her. Then unexpectedly that smiley group of girls walked over to her and they were all talking, this is the start of something good, something new. 

I think this story represents everything a Christmas story should. It tells you to have hope on even the most hopeless of days. It tells you that everyone is worth love and happiness even if you don’t feel like you deserve it. It most importantly, reminds people to reach out, make new friends and spread the love. 

We were going to use a cover of you’ve got a friend in me because it’s about friendships- YouveGotAFriendInMe

but now we think this cover of mad world is better since it talks about feeling invisible and not having friends at school. Then the mad world is how she got exactly what she wanted- MadWorld

Me and the group decided to film our advert at the start of December but then Josh’s brother got COVID and he couldn’t come in for a few days because he had to get properly tested. So this was two days before we planned to film it. So we asked Martin who was our back up filmmaker if he could film it and he said yes. So I wrote the script and sent it to josh, josh sent it to Martin so he could make it more professional. Martin changed the story quite a lot though, actually the story was completely different because he tried to take out the abuse we had in it. So he took out the part where the dad shadow pushes the mam shadow. And then instead of her finding a note and the girls coming over to introduce themselves, he written that the girls meet and throw a surprise party for Liv. I think Martins idea was really good, how ever it’s not the vibe we were going for. We wanted it to target middle aged women with the thoughtful small act of kindness that shows the sweetness of the girls like the note or the party. However, I don’t really understand the party. There’s questions that go unanswered. For an example, why are they having a party? What are they celebrating? I think the audience questions are good when people can figure out things that the advert already interpreted. But it’s not that good when the audience try and figure a lot of it out. I think Martin was targeting people age 11-15 which isn’t what we were going for. We wanted it to be mainly middle ages women, mothers and teenagers because we were wanting people to relate to Liv  (teenagers) or people to sympathise and make them emotional imagining their kids in that situation (mothers, middle aged women). So after we all discussed it we decided to stick with the original script because we thought it sent more of a message and was more thoughtful. By the time we were filming it we didn't need Martin to film it  anymore because Josh had came back negative. we were glad that we made our contingency plan though because if Josh had tested negative and we didn't have a backup we wouldn't have been able to get our advert in on time

The advert is going to be around 1 minuet long which is enough time to let our story be told. 

 

Our unique selling point for our advert is how much people can relate to it, especially teenagers which aren’t usually represented as vulnerable in adverts. As teenagers ourselves we thought creating an advert that highlighted problems in the teenage world would be the most authentic and honest from us and not from an older person who thinks they get it, just as we wouldn’t be able to create an advert based on the lives of people between 40 and 50 accurately because we haven’t experienced them ages yet. We feel that creating this advert will help a lot of people our age because we understand that being a young adult isn’t always “the best time of your life”.  There are so many teenagers who struggle with moving to new schools and colleges and it not being incredible like the movies say. There are so many people, like Liv, that dread everyday of college and school because they know they’re going to have to be all alone for hours. We created this advert in the hopes of making people like us feel less alone and a little more hopeful, that’s why we made sure to close it off with a happy ending, we get it.

The intended purpose of the completed production was to comfort young people and give them hope. And to also, wanted people who aren’t teenagers anymore, watch this advert and sympathise with the character's, we want the advert to touch their hearts and have our positive message stick with them, our positive message being have hope and spread joy, especially at Christmas.

We’ve made a presentation pitching our advert: ( Hi, ive got lots of photo's and videos to add to this but it wont let me so i cannot post the pitch right now sorry)