Advertising Is Not Working

To begin this project we were shown the film "Somers Town". It turned out this was an advert for Eurostar trains. We were told by our tutor Dan Duran that people aren't paying attention to traditional adverts these days, advertisers have to be a lot more subtle and weave adverts into the fabric of things more.

With this in mind we were given a list of companies and told to select one to do a advert that wasn't an advert for, getting a message across is a new exciting way. I thought about games but it's been done, films have been done, then we were told that we shouldn't feel limited by what we could personally produce, it only needed to be a proposal. Oh, and we had to work in teams, which was sort of annoying. I worked with Miles, I like Miles, he's sound, but we had really different ideas about what to do and didn't chat to each other for a little bit.

I researched what made viral videos popular and looked at how Derren Brown does his mind control tricks, this clip especially inspired my initial ideas:



My plan was to combine all the things that make viral videos successful (dance/replicable movement/noises, Animals, Hot chicks, Filming looks accidental) along with how Derren Brown implants ideas into peoples heads. As Derren Brown used to be a graphic designer I really felt that this line of thinking was the right way to go.

The video would be recorded on a phone and go like this:

-dog doing cute dance move
-hot chick bends over to pet the dog and exclaim how cute it is
-then there's a loud bang
-camera pans to the cause of the bang, it's a car crashed into the back of a DHL van
-DHL delivery guy runs over to help the guy in the car

Then abruptly end the video, it combines everything people want to watch; cute animals dancing, hot girls and death.

I met up with Miles and he was thinking totally different. He wanted to do a Tarmac sponsored skate park, but I didn't get why Tarmac would sponsor a skatepark. His other idea was a healthy pop up grocery shop from Asda that would be in festivals. But I didn't get why Asda wouldn't just put their name on it, there was no reason for them not to in my mind.

So I convinced Miles to go with my idea, storyboarded and then that was it, we didn't have the means to actually make a video of a dancing dog, a hot babe and a crashing car with a DHL van. Miles felt we needed to make something and I conceded the point, so we made a little stop motion animation of some bi-planes trying to catch the pigeon like in that Dick Dastardly thing. We showed it at the mid year show, and amongst all of them 4 minute longer than they needed to be videos it was a welcome break, being only 20 somet' seconds long.