A2 Evaluation

Inderpreet Kaur Basran

In my evaluation I will talk through the procedure of my A2 coursework that we had formed, during the period of coursework time, as a group of three we had to create; one sponsorship, two adverts and one radio advert. After reading my evaluation you will understand the whole concept of how we created our adverts and how we were influenced by real media texts, which appear similarly with a twist or slight amendments in our adverts.

Our first advert, which is a sponsorship sequence is a fast forwarded scene, this scene conducts of hair being curled and all the different procedures that take place in order for the hair to get the curl look, and then the actual hairspray ‘Boo’ being sprayed onto the hair. Our sponsorship has challenged an existing advert which is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo1I7EyOl78

This is a Vo5 advert which we believe was the perfect advert to emulate, as it targets young females, such as our ‘Boo Hairspray’. By speeding up our advert, I believe this gave it a professional feel and allowed our audience to only concentrate for a short amount of time on it, meaning they wouldn’t lose interest.We could have improved it by choosing to shoot in a range of different locations, which would have made it considerably more exciting. However, we didn’t set out to film an exotic, glamorous advert- we wanted an advert that showed an achievable look for normal girls everywhere.

Our radio advert is explains the different types of hairstyles and hair types the spray can be used on. The adverts conventions link into many radio adverts because many talk about what their products are about and end with a small tagline; our tagline is ‘Boo, it’s that hairspray for you’, which makes it, in my opinion, noticeable and memorable. An example of this is in a 30 second TV advert- its tagline which is “Tresemmé, professional, affordable”. Here is the website link for this TV advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4faEEwQ5LsE

On the other hand our Advert 1 consists of a young girl waking up in the morning and having a bad hair day, then she experiences the amazing hairspray called ‘Boo’ in contrast this advert we made was slightly similar to the ‘Cell C For Yourself’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WZa1QpLVTI

This advert has a lot of comparative points which helped us decide on the idea of having a bad day start to our opening shot of the advert. Comparing both adverts I would justify that our advert is very similar because they are both targeted to the same age range of people and our advert has a simple, easy and much cheaper structure and would be seen more often by youngsters as it has slight humorous shots within. This would appeal to young females in particular who are looking for a new hairspray product to use. Our advert is light, fun, realistic and an easy watch- everything an advert that targets younger people should be.

Finally, our last advert is primarily about on a young girl at school who is also having a bad hair day. For this advert we did not compare it to other adverts or take the framework from another advert, we simply filmed because our original plan did not work, and whilst filming ideas kept falling into place. I think the original ideas did not follow any conventions therefore we had struggled in setting it out and getting it right to the scene structures, then eventually the original ideal advert had faded as we came up with better ideas whilst filming. Although this was a risky advert to generate, I think that it would appeal to younger females simply because it is different and eye catching compared to any other advert out there, structured on similar hair products.

This advert of ours had challenged other adverts such as:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvmmfRDXAPo because we went for an original and diverse attribute within our advert, this is because many adverts are based on girls and the way they act and look in an advert. By using an openly homosexual male to do the hair of our character because it was something different and unique and in my opinion this would appeal to the audience more because they would want to know what the advert is all about, whereas in the similar and regular ones people know that it’s just going to show girls with basic or already glamorously styled hair which they tend to get bored of. By showing the hair actually being styled with a long shot, this allowed the audience to witness just how easy it would be to use our product.

The conventions in most cosmetic adverts are; music, props, dialogues, sound effects, mise-en-scene, locations, character types, editing, pace then finally a conclusion. Our sponsorship has kept to the conventions as it contains, background music, props; which is the hairspray bottle, dialogues towards the end of the sponsorship when the product is shown to the camera, our chosen location was a living room, but in the sequence it seems look like a pretty background that has been dropped.

The editing that has been added is speeding up the sequence and adding music, cutting off unwanted scenes, and shortening the length of some shots, our sponsorship concludes when the product is advertised to the camera. Moving on, our advert 1 also sticks to the conventions because of our mise-en-scene. The costume fits within the scene when our character wakes up out of bed and is in her night wear. She then has a start to a bad hair day and parts of the sequence have been edited to get the right flow of the scene.

Dialogue has also been used throughout most of the sequence because at first the actress screams by seeing the look of her hair, and dialogue has also been used towards the end when discovering the product. In advert 2 we have used props which were; the hairspray bottle, chair and a hair bobble, these sorts of props are used in many hairspray adverts, for example when the person is sitting down and using hair bobbles to partition the hair to keep it in the right place and make it easier to style. an example of this is in this advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2gDdw9SKBE in this advert they use props such as a hairbrush, curling tongs and a hairdryer, the basic and common equipment needed and used whilst styling hair and similarly our adverts consists on similar props being used and appearing in the different adverts.