In this evaluation, the author discusses the process of creating a viral advertisement with their group. They felt pre-production went well, as they researched successful viral ads and developed ideas and a storyboard. However, deciding on a final idea took a long time. Filming went smoothly once they had costumes, but they lost time waiting for the costumes to be completed. Areas for improvement include making decisions more quickly and avoiding delays.

1. Project evaluation
In this evaluation I will explain the good and bad points of the process of making our viral advert. I will
discuss what I felt my group did well during this project and what I feel we could have changed or
improved on if we were to do this particular project again.
Pre-production
What went well: I felt that my group did quite well during the pre-production section of our project. As
soon as we started I began to gather a lot of information about viral ads and the campaigns they are used
for to include on my personal blog for evidence of research. We began to look into successful; viral ads
from the past few years and the campaigns or causes they were created for. Some of last year’s most
popular ads included the john west salmon and old spice body wash advertisements and saw outstanding
success with sales rising greatly. We felt that this research was relevant in helping us understand what
makes a successful viral advert and the particular themes included in them. We generally found the key
to popular viral ads included three crucial things; they had to be short, unique and mostly humorous, we
tried to keep these things in mind when thinking of ideas for our own ad.
When we had decided on a final idea for out ad when began to make some rough drafts of the script,
although they isn’t much dialogue in our film there are many different camera angles and shots which
we needed to include in the script and decided which order to put them in. I began to draw up a story
board and discuss with my group how we wanted the shots to look. I felt that we did well on this pre-
production by starting it quickly so we had had a good amount of time to change anything if needed.
Although it did take us a while to agree on a final idea, once we had we quickly started planning
everything out to make up for the time we had lost. After fully completing the story board we had to go
back to the script and make a few minor changes we were adding in a few more scenes to make the
movie flow better, once we had done this and wrote it up as the second draft we were ready to film.
What didn’t go well:although there were many things that we did well during the pre-production of our project,
there were also things that didn’t go so well and made the process of completing our film more difficult. Once we
had all our research into viral adverts done and posted on our blogs, we needed to begin thinking about deciding
on a idea for our own ad. Although we came up with a lot of interesting ideas for our advert, it was a tiresome
process of deciding on a final one. We started by thinking of how we would do each idea, taking in mind how long
it would take, if we had the resources needed and the right space and good locations to shoot it. Eventually we
became stuck between to different ideas, as we were basing our viral ad on retro video games, in cooperation with
the media production level 2 group, both were based around this theme.
Our first idea was to do a “clay-mation” piece based on the popular Nintendo game series “super smash bros” in
which a animated clay models of the games characters come out of a TV screen and start battling each other. We
liked this idea because it was unique and fun but also fairly simple to do and film. Our second idea was to do a live
action piece of film called “goomba” in which two people dressed in Mario and luigi costumes find a strange
creature in their back garden and attempt to defeat it. This piece was and obviousreference to the popular
“superMario bros” game franchise. Eventually we decided on doing this second idea, as after much discussion we
thought that although the clay mation movie was simple and could be done easily, making the models and
animating them would take a lot of time, typically because when doing a stop motion animated movie you have to
move a model 24 times for every second of completed film.

2. Making the film
What went well: after all our pre-production was completed we could begin on shooting the footage for our viral
ad. Although we had to wait a few days so we had the completed costumes for our actors, we were quick to film
the shots we needed and started to think about how we were going to animate different things into the film using
after effects in the post production. When we had the fully completed costumes we thought that they were an
excellent addition for the film, and really helped us to achieve the very surreal and dreamlike element that we were
aiming to do. We were able to follow the storyboard we had created very well and could film most of the shots
within a single day; this gave us more time to start editing the footage which is the most important part for out film.
What didn’t go well: although we managed to quickly film all our shots we needed within a few days, we had to
delay the filming for a while due to not having the completed costumes, because of this we lost a lot of time that
could have been spent editing our film and getting accustomed to the adobe after effects software that we needed
to use.