Unit 1: Introduction to Media Processes and Technical Skills & Unit 2: Introduction to Design and Research Skills - Task 1 & 3: Production Diary - Advertising Production

This is a daily log of all of my involvement in the production of the Christmas advert A Trip Down Memory Lane.






Tuesday 19th November 2019

I came up with the idea for my groups Christmas advert when we were first told about doing this project. I have always loved celebrating Christmas, like most people, and the most memorable ones I have had was when my Grandma was still around. My Grandma was a big part of my life and she always made Christmas even more enjoyable every year. So, having my Grandma in mind, I always wondered what Christmases must have been like for her when she was around my age (or younger) and if she could still fully look back on those memories. When talking to her, in the past, about Christmases she celebrated when she was a child, she mainly remembered them once she had seen a photograph which caused memories to be triggered in her mind and bring her back to that happy time and place that she spent with her family. She did also have Alzheimer's which made it harder for her to remember her past, and we wanted to incorporate more of that into the advert but then we decided against it and were also advised that we shouldn't bring terminal illnesses into the advert as it is meant to be a happy Christmas advert. 

I did also love the idea of travelling back in time as my favourite film of all time is Back to the Future (1985) and I loved the idea of when Marty McFly went 30 years into the past (the 1955, set in the '50s) and saw how different his parents were when they were younger compared to how they are as adults in his present time. I thought this would be a really nice idea to have in the advert just to be able to show how Christmas has changed over the years, through decorations, furnishings, technology and lifestyle, but also has kept the same because spending time with your loved ones and the warmth of Christmas has always stayed the same (I had also watched the film again at this point so that was still in my mind as I was creating the idea for the advert). Linking back to memory, I wanted the Grandma to be able to go back in time through the strength of her memories rather than an actual time machine as I thought it would be more sentimental that she'd look at a photograph from a past Christmas and then remember everything from that moment, and remember a time when she would get really excited about celebrating Christmas. 

So, me and my group (Amiliyah Ashraf & Nathan Appleby) finalised the idea and created a meaningful message of keeping your elderly loved ones close, and gift them with their past memories of their own Christmases from long ago, as well as creating new ones for them to look back on in the future. I think this idea is quite similar to a John Lewis advert, particularly The Boy and The Piano (2018), the Elton John advert, as that goes through the history of Elton John's life and career and looks at a Christmas that changed his life forever, as the message is clear to keep a tight hold on memories from the past but also ones that you are making. The idea also embraces the Christmas holiday and shows that love and family are huge contributions towards having an amazing Christmas.

When being set with the task of making a John Lewis like Christmas advert, I had to think about everything that goes into and makes a John Lewis advert a certain style that is clearly recognisable to the brand (from audiences' perspectives) but also why they are so successful. Me and Amiliyah had analysed the John Lewis advert 'The Bear and The Hare' (2013) together before we even knew we were going to be working together on an advert. This advert is a very original and unique idea from the brand that has a very Disney feel to it.


The advert is a sweet story about an unlikely friendship between a bear and a hare. The advert discusses how everyone should be involved and included at Christmas and how everyone should look put for one another during the holidays. This highly shows the themes of giving, caring and love. The advert ends with the quote "Give someone a Christmas they'll never forget", this is to show the audience the message they were displaying throughout the advert and to also directly tell audiences that they should do the same in through the holiday. This advert is very emotional and heartfelt, instantly making viewers feel warm and festive. John Lewis adverts have become a staple of Christmas in the UK throughout recent years with everyone hardly containing themselves for their arrival every year. What makes these adverts so unique is that it's not until the very end that you actually realise that this was just an advert that is selling its brand and not some type of Disney short. There is nowhere throughout the advert that actually advertises a certain product and rather the story itself is a selling point for the brand.

I was the only member of my group who already had an idea in mind when we had to contribute ideas to each other and see which idea we wanted to put onto its feet. I did contribute my idea and all my group seemed to like it but we did also create a few other ideas on the spot just in case we thought of something better to do. We created about 4 more rough ideas and were now down to two that we wanted to do. There was my advert idea and Nathan's idea, which was based on something that happened to him when he was little on Christmas Day. When he was younger he had this teddy bear for a really long time and a few days before Christmas he lost it, then on Christmas Day his parents told him to open up a present and it was then revealed it was the teddy bear that he had lost. So, our idea was going to be that but were we follow what happened to the teddy bear and how he got found again. But, in the end we just stuck with my idea as I already had it all planned out in my head and was ready to write the script for it too. Nathan wasn't particularly happy about this but I did already have this idea for a while and had been thinking about it quite a lot. 

I did end up doing the script later on that night when I got back home after college as me and my group then started working on how to better the advert, and get it to as high a standard, as possible, to John Lewis.

As you can see in the script, It's a Wonderful Life (1946) is incorporated in the story. This was mainly because us as a group and only being in this course for a little bit now, we wanted to show our love and appreciation towards film. We originally thought we could have It's a Wonderful Life playing only in the '50s scene and then have a modern Christmas film (we were going to have Home Alone because that is all of our groups favourite Christmas film) in the present-day scene. But we then just stuck to using It's a Wonderful Life in both time periods as the film is very much a classic and known to be one of the most beloved Christmas films in cinema history. We also wanted to use the film, specifically the title, It's a Wonderful Life to tell audiences that when you have all your family caring for you and around you and creating memories, as well as reliving them, then what you have is "a Wonderful Life".


Once we had settled on using my idea, me and my group then got started on creating our pitch and proposal to sell to our class and teachers and also to make sure that the idea made sense and was actually able to do. 

This wasn't too hard to do as we all knew the idea pretty well after I had explained thoroughly a few times, and because we kept adding to the idea. We didn't get time to finish that day so we were set on finishing it in the morning.

Wednesday 20th November 2019

As soon as all my group got into college, we got to working on finishing our pitch so that we were ready to present it to everyone in the afternoon. Me and Amiliyah also worked on the proposal at the same time as most of what we put in the pitch we also just incorporated into the proposal. 

Once we finished the pitch, we were then ready to present it to everyone. Everyone seemed to really like the idea and were interested by it. The teachers also really liked the idea, which was a huge relief as I mainly wanted them to be onboard with creating this advert with this idea. I think there only problems with it was the amount of cast we needed, as we needed two different families (for the '50s and the present) but also set dressing for the '50s. We needed to be able to find a location/home that would be easy to dress it up like a '50s home and also one that didn't look too modern. Originally, I went for the idea of being in the present and going back in time as a bit of a challenge. I didn't just want it to be a simple advert of a family coming together and having a nice Christmas day together, I wanted it to be more than that, I wanted to be able to push myself and get creative but also having a meaning behind the idea and a way for that message to shine through the advert. I also really wanted to challenge myself on making this right and to getting a set that could look like a living room from the '50s as much as possible, whether that be finding a physical location that looked suitable to the time or dressing a house head to toe to look as if we were actually in the '50s. This would also be down to costume, hair and makeup. Hair and makeup wouldn't be a huge problem as we can ask hair and makeup if they would be able to do it, but it might be a little bit trickier to find costume that's appropriate and suits that period. 


Thursday 21st November 2019

When we came in we were asked to look at a John Lewis advert, of our choice, and use an analysis sheet to be able to understand everything that goes into creating a successful Christmas advert on that scale. The John Lewis advert that I chose to analyse was 'Monty the Penguin' (2014). This is my favourite John Lewis advert, alongside The Boy and the Piano, but I chose to do the Monty the Penguin advert instead as I felt I was more familiar with that advert and thought it would be interesting to see if I could identify all the different elements that made that advert so heart-warming and enjoyable to audiences.

This sheet was really useful as it was very much a guideline of understanding everything that goes into constructing a great John Lewis advert and also understanding why audiences are drawn to them every year when they come out. I understood the use of the advertising technique Pathos, is the key to a successful John Lewis advert, as the company sells their brand through evoking emotional responses from their audiences. For example, audiences feel sentiment and warmth for Monty and his friendship with the little boy but, further to the end of the advert, audiences then feel upset for Monty as we now understand that he doesn't have a partner to be able love and care for. Then at the end, audiences feel happy again as Monty is gifted with a partner on Christmas Day. The advert makes audiences feel a variety of emotions as they feel sympathetic towards this little penguin not being able to find love of his own but then at the very end he is eventually gifted with love. It's not until the end when you find out that the penguins are actually just toys, causing audiences to feel overwhelmed again as the advert shows how vivid children's imaginations can be and for a child to conjure up a story like this in their mind is very heart-warming to an audience.

There is also a lot put into the technicality of a John Lewis, from the music used, to the production, actors, cinematography, etc. These were huge factors me and my group needed to think about when producing our own advert. We had already found a song cover to play throughout our advert, which is 'Yesterday', originally by The Beatles, sung by Connie Talbot, this is the perfect song to use as it links to the theme of memory in our advert and the song is sung beautifully and accompanied by a gentle piano melody. What we mainly had to think next was what type of shots we wanted to do and how our set was going to look like, both '50s and present time, as well as what props we were going to have. We had pretty much thought a lot about these technical aspects as we had to present these aspects and skills in our pitch, but now it was just thinking in more depth of everything that we needed to put into the production of our advert. 

I also used the Monty the Penguin advert for my critical comparison, alongside the Sainsbury's 2014 advert named '1914'. 


Monday 25th November 2019

This was the day we got started on all of our pre-production paperwork for our advert. 

First, started off with figuring out what everyone's job roles were going to be on our production. This didn't take us long to figure out what everyone was going to do as we looked at everyone's strong points from previous projects we all worked on together. So, everyone roles on set were:

Roles on Set

Harriet Parvin (me): 

• Director
• Producer
• Scriptwriter
• Location Manager
• Art Director (props, set dressing and costume, hair and makeup)
• Editor

Amiliyah Ashraf:

• 2nd Assistant Director
• Main Camera Operator
• Editor

Nathan Appleby:

• 1st Assistant Director 
• Director of Photography
• Assistant Camera Operator 
• Script Supervisor
• Editor

I also did the paperwork for everyone's production roles, which wasn't much as it's just the same as the list I put above. 

Once finishing production roles, we then got onto doing pre-production paperwork that went along with our own job roles. 

I did the treatment/synopsis first and got some help from Amiliyah with what to put on the paperwork for it. This wasn't too hard as we just had to discuss the plot of the advert and then add a list of all the characters that are involved in the story. 

Amiliyah and Nathan started working on the shot list together, from time to time I would help out and was also asked about what types of shots we would do for certain moments in the advert. I feel as if I could have helped out more as being Director, I should have helped the Director of Photography with all of the shot list, but at least I got asked and helped out when I could about how I envisioned what particular shots would look like. I also asked for feedback on what shot type to use as well, whether it was the right shot to use or if we could use a different type to make a certain moment look much better.


Design (Set)

Whilst Amiliyah and Nathan were working on the shot list, I started having a look at photos from the 1950s of living rooms in homes decorated for Christmas, as well as clothing, hair and makeup of that time, as my job is Art Director. I first started looking at set design for the advert by looking at pictures online of homes in the '50s at Christmas. A lot of the homes are furnished with furniture that was modern to that time, there is a lot of floral patterns on sofas, curtains, carpets, etc. The living rooms also looked quite bare, apart from having a few Christmas decorations in them, mostly the Christmas tree being the most important part of the room. All the Christmas trees in photos look quite small or have few branches on them, and then the trees just having loads of decorations (baubles, tinsel, streamers, beads) covering them from head to toe. Many of the decorations looked quite tacky and it was one of my main goals to find decorations that fit the '50s but also bearing in mind that this is meant to be a John Lewis advert. So, the decorations needed to just look appropriate and match the colour of the setting too, which we hadn't figured out location at that point yet. There is also quite a bit of tinsel around the rooms as well, but the room still looks bare and empty. 

In some of these photos of the different living rooms in the '50s, I also got an idea of the sense of fashion and the clothes people would wear in that time. Seeing that many of the people dressed well for the holiday, a lot of the clothing being quite vibrant and not really matching as well. But, again, having to think of it as a John Lewis advert, we wanted the costumes to look more formal and appropriate. The photos on the right also show the type of family we wanted to portray in the advert, having it be a big family all getting together to celebrate Christmas together. 

This photo on the left shows the sort of style we wanted in the advert. Loads of presents, decorations everywhere, a fireplace, a tree fully decorated. This is a more sophisticated look of a home in the '50s, I think this may have been owned by someone who is much wealthier than most of the pictures above, but this is the type of idea and look we were going for to set the '50s scene. 

Whilst looking at different photos for inspiration and ideas of how our '50s set would look, I started adding them to a word document and created a design breakdown of the set. I also started on another design breakdown that discussed what would be in both sets for the '50s and the present day. 

Costume

After looking at sets for a while, I then moved onto costume, hair and makeup. I mainly looked at costume, but also had an idea for what hairstyles and makeup would be used in the advert, as looking at a lot of the photos for costume, many of the people had their hair styled in a certain way and a lot of the women had makeup on in the pictures. 

I first started looking at costume for what the children would wear in the advert. We were thinking of a child to play the '50s version of the Grandma and also for her to have a cousin, to show the family coming around for Christmas and also having someone (a cousin) for the younger Grandma to be with. So, I had a look at the different types of dresses they could possibly wear. The picture on the left is from a '50s Christmas fashion catalogue showing a variety of dresses. For the girls, we wanted them to wear festive looking dresses that puffed out around the skirt of the dress, as well as some flat shoes and some tights. For the cousin, I also wanted her to have a coat, scarf and some gloves as she's just travelled through the cold to arrive at the family's house.

For the men, the Christmas clothes that I looked at for them from the '50s were more to do with much older men and wasn't the type of costume I wanted the boys to have in the advert. I did want the costumes to look festive, mostly have a festive tie and possibly socks to, but all the jumpers and trousers were too colourful and didn't really match up with each other. So, I then just had to look up for clothes that an average man from the '50s would wear, specifically in the UK as when I searched for '50s clothes it would usually show me American clothing and looked like something out of the film Grease. What I was looking more for was a type of suit or formal wear. These pictures on the right show the type of costume I wanted in the advert, looking more at the two photos at the top. The costume I wanted the boys to wear in the advert was a white button up shirt, black trousers, black shoes and socks, and a tie that would hopefully have some type of pattern on it, looking more towards a Christmas patterned tie. One of the boys we would be casting would be the uncle, so for him I wanted him to have a large overcoat as he will travelled through the cold to get to his family's house to spend Christmas with them all.

Costumes for the women in the advert was the easiest to find out of the men and the children. There were many pictures online of '50s Christmas fashion catalogues that were really useful when getting an idea for what the girls should wear. I mainly wanted the girls to wear long either a blouse and skirt or a dress with colours associated to Christmas (green, red, light blue). I always wanted them to wear either flat shoes or small heels, preferably black, also with tights. I then also thought to makeup their costumes more festive and suitable to the holidays, I thought for them to have Christmas jewellery of any kind, mostly Christmas earrings if they have their ears pierced. Again, one of the girls we would be casting will be the auntie, I would also like her to have a coat and also some gloves. 












I didn't have time to finish the breakdown sheets in lesson that day, so I waited until we were going into college the next day to do them as we had a longer day and I wanted to keep myself busy with work.


Tuesday 26th November 2019

When getting into college that morning, I started working on all the breakdown sheets straight away. I finished the breakdown sheets for set design and costume and got started on hair and makeup, also finishing the breakdown sheets for them in the lesson. 

Amiliyah and Nathan both continued working on the shot list and kept informing me of what shot they got up too and how we wanted it to be. 


Makeup

For the girls, I wanted their makeup to look natural but have more colour on their lips and eyes. The pictures above show a few photos of the styles of makeup I wanted to go for in the advert. It is a very minimal amount of makeup, mainly just having bright pink or red lipstick on, a bit of blush and either blue or green eyeshadow. 


Hair

After I had finished looking at all the makeup, which didn't take too long, I then started looking at different hairstyles from the '50s.

I first started looking at men's hairstyles from the '50s. I didn't think this would be too hard of a task as we just needed to cast actors who had short hair that would be easy to style into one of these looks from the pictures. A lot of these styles seemed like they would be easy to pull off in the advert, especially with the help of the hair and makeup department. 

 
I had a look at hairstyles of some actors and singers from the '50s as well, here on the left is photos of Frank Sinatra (left) and Marlon Brando (right). These were more the hairstyles I was thinking of for the men in the advert as both their hairstyles are greased up and slicked back into a neat style, with a few curls as well. 




     
I then had a look at the women's hairstyles, which I think went much better than trying to find styles for the men as there was a wide variety of hairstyles to choose from. After looking at many different styles, I set on these two different styles on the right, styles for long hair and the pageboy hairstyle. 

I wanted both actresses to have different hairstyles. So, one of the actors could have their hair-styled like one of these on the right, maybe with a hairband too, and for the other actor they could have their hair done in some type of up-do, preferably a ponytail, also maybe with a hairband. 

I couldn't really find much for hairstyles for the young girls that would be in the advert, so I thought for them to be quite similar to these pictures. I wanted them to have very curly hair, either down or up in a ponytail as well and with a hairband or bows, or their hair in plaits. Again, it was hard to look for any ideas for how their hair could be styled as there weren't many photos actually from the '50s online that I could look at for inspiration. But, even looking back at the photo of the costumes fro the '50s Christmas catalogue, seeing the girl's different hairstyles gave an idea for what they should look like in the advert. 



After finishing the hair and makeup breakdown sheets, I then moved on to doing the props list, this didn't take too long as me and my group had been talking about everything we were going to need for both the '50s and present-day scenes. So, I got the props list done in no time. I think we mainly just needed to think more about what to get to set dress the '50s and what types of props we wanted around as we needed to find props that looked of that time.

After finishing these sheets, I then started on the character breakdown. Again, this wasn't a hard job to do as I only had to describe what characters do in the advert and a little about their context. I was also the one to do the paperwork for this as I knew more about the characters and understood their personalities and how they are presented in the advert. I didn't get time to finish this in the lesson so I left it until the next day when we had another lesson. 

Whilst I was doing the character breakdown, as a group, we then thought of starting to find cast for the advert. We first started with the two actresses we wanted to play the auntie and the mother. So, we got in touch with two of the actors, Sophie Ashcroft and Kate Drummond, on the performing arts course at the college, they both replied straight away saying they would be a part of the advert which was really great news. We made sure to keep them updated once we were finding out the location for filming and letting them know about costume, hair and makeup as soon as possible. 

Once we got them two to be part of the advert, we then just needed to think and decide who we were going to ask for the rest of the cast. This became quite tricky as we wanted people who had some acting skills but also who fit our description of the characters. So, we needed to have a good think about who we were going to try and get for our advert. 


Wednesday 27th November 2019

As soon as I got to the lesson that morning, I finished off the character breakdown sheet as I didn't have much left to write about some of the different characters in the advert. This was also a much shorter lesson this day so we all tried to do as much as possible, with Amiliyah and Nathan still working on the shot list together. 

After I was done with the character breakdown, we started to try and sort out the casting again. We seemed to not be having any look with this, and this was also probably one of the hardest parts of pre-production we had to do as a group. 

It was when I got home when I started to think of who we could get and ask to be in our advert, but I still wasn't able to find the right people for the roles, either they were unavailable or I just couldn't find anyone, there was no one I knew who would want to be in the advert. 

I had also asked for my mum's permission to be able to film in our house for the present-day scenes and she was absolutely fine with it, we also knew at the point we would probably be filming those scenes, we would have our Christmas decorations up as it was nearing up to December. So, as the Art Director, I didn't worry too much about the set dressing for those scenes. 


Thursday 28th November 2019

I started working on the risk assessment with Amiliyah when we got into college and Nathan started on the storyboard as he had finally finished the shot list, and he is the best drawer out of me and Amiliyah, so it was best that Nathan did the storyboard. He also knew how all the shots would look, so it was easier for him to draw and label all of them onto the storyboard.

So, me and Amiliyah had to think about all the precautions we needed to make and how to overcome them on the days we would be shooting. This was a hard task for us as the only location that we had at that point was my house for the present-day scene, and we were still trying to find somewhere for the '50s. We knew we would only be filming in a house for the '50s, so the risk assessment was applied to both locations, whatever the '50s location was going to be. So, another job for me and Amiliyah, was trying to find a location for the '50s. 

I also did the design breakdown paperwork, I didn't do a lot for this as it was more just a brief understanding of what was needed on both sets. 

It was after this that I printed out the props list and made notes of what everyone was going to get and bring in. After all of that I actually ended bringing/buying all of the props for the advert as we were building up to actually filming them. 

As it was a shorter day at college, I didn't get to finish all of my work and ended up doing it at home that night. When I got home, I ordered a phone magnifier that looked like an old-fashioned TV, and it had arrived that night. So, I pieced it all together. It didn't take very long and it was much bigger than I thought it was going to be. It is still quite a magnifier and we were going to have to work our way around creating some type of illusion to make it look bigger in the advert. But, it still looked great and would do the trick for showing It's a Wonderful Life in the '50s scene. 

I also asked my auntie if we could use her house to film our '50s scene at and she was fine with that, which was great as I was starting to doubt if we were even going to be able to film the '50s scene at all. Along with getting the location, I cast my little cousin to be in the advert as well, Libby Greer, as she got really excited about filming it at her house and we needed a little girl for the '50s scene too. So, that was lucky for us that we finally found a location and at a cast member at the same time. 



Friday 29th November 2019

This would usually be a day off from college, but I was really starting to get worried about all of our pre-production for the advert and getting props and cast sorted out. So, I asked if my group could round to my house and help me with finishing the risk assessment and to help get some props at the shops. 

Everyone came around for 13:00 and we got to work straight away. We first started with finishing the risk assessment, and now that we had both locations, the risk assessment now fully applied to both locations. 

After finishing this, we then headed off to the shops and bought some Christmas decorations for the '50s scene, mostly tinsel, and wrapping paper, bows and ribbons for making the presents. This didn't take us very long to do and we all just went back to my house and started finding easy objects to wrap up (shoe boxes, gift boxes, biscuit tins, cereal boxes, Pop Funko Boxes, puzzle boxes, etc). After wrapping up loads of boxes to resemble presents, everyone then left at around 17:30. This was a massive help from my group as I didn't know when we would be able to get all the presents done for all of the scenes. It was also good for them to come round so they could have a look at my living room, where we would be filming, and look into how we would dress all of the set and have the furniture arranged. 


Sunday 1st December 2019

As it was the 1st December, my family usually decorates all of the house straight away. So, as we were taking decorations out of the garage, we found that we had a small, fake tree that I was allowed to use for the advert, in the '50s. We also then asked my grandad if I was able to borrow some of his Christmas decorations to use for the tree in the advert. So, later that day he brought a whole bag of decorations and I started to look through it and see which ones would fit the set and tree best. Loads of the decorations were ones that he had collected over the years from various places, so they worked really well when thinking back to the '50s and even looking back at the pictures online of Christmas from that time, they matched what were on many people's trees. When decorations the tree, we didn't have any streamers and instead I cut up some of the tinsel me and my group got at the shops, and started to wrap some strands around the branches so they could just hang down. I then put some of the ornaments/baubles my Grandad had brought round and that was the '50s tree all done. 

The scrapbook had also arrived that day, along with all of the Christmas pens, stickers and stencils for decorating. I only started doing the front cover of the scrapbook as we didn't have any photos that needed to be in the book just yet, we would be taking photos on set of the '50s and then print them out afterwards. I made the scrapbook cover look more homemade and as if the Grandchildren had decorated it for their Grandma, as this makes the present more heartfelt and sentimental when it's made by the ones you love. I covered it with some Christmas tape, that had also arrived, along with putting a wooden snowflake, a star sticker and using the stencils draw on the stars and snowflakes, as well as the Merry Christmas at the top. 


Monday 2nd December 2019

Beginning a new week and getting ready for our first shooting day at the end of it, this is when I felt everything started to go downhill and this is when I also realised I was the one being left to do, pretty much, all of the work. So, this put a lot of pressure on me to get everything sorted for the end of the week. 

I was left to find all of our cast and I was also still waiting for Nathan to give me the storyboard, but he hadn't finished it because he had ran out of storyboard sheets and said he would do it for the next day. 

For the whole lesson I worked on getting all of our cast and finalised everyone who was going to be in it. We also asked two members of our class, Tom Swales and Sam Liddell, if they would be the Father and Uncle in the '50s scenes and they were fine with being in the advert. The night before we had found someone to play the Grandma, Sheila Laverick, and also got my sister to be in the advert as the Mother, Emily Parvin, in the present-day scenes. We had also finally cast someone to play the Father, Elliot Llewellyn, in the present-day scenes, as we were all starting to get really worried if we were even going to be able to find anyone to play the role. We had also cast all of the children and that was our cast list finally done. We then just kept getting in touch with everyone about what type of costume they needed to bring in. 


Tuesday 3rd December 2019

When I got into college, I finally got Nathan to email me the shot list as he had been finished with it for ages and never bothered to send it to me, even though I had reminded him constantly about it. 

When he finally sent it to me, I then noticed there were quite a few problems with it. Some of the shot numbers were either missed out or not put in the right order, as well as shot descriptions and shot types explained very confusingly. Also, we didn't have the scene timings on there either which was another problem as we then didn't know how long we should film certain shots for. It also wasn't the neatest of shot lists. 

After looking through this, me and Amiliyah then had to re-do the shot list as we needed to be able to understand how shots should be done and what's happening in them when we actually got to filming them. This then pushed back more of mine and Amilyah's pre-production work that we needed to get on with as Nathan was off somewhere else. 

I then moved onto doing the shooting schedules, for both shoot days, but didn't get enough time in the lesson to finish it, so I was going to do the rest the next day in lesson. 


Wednesday 4th December 2019

As soon as I got into college, I then finished off the shooting schedules for our two different shooting days. 

Shooting Schedule - Day 1

Shooting Schedule - Day 2

It was also this day where we had another massive issue the day before we started filming and that was I had forgotten to get in touch with the hair and makeup department, to be able to do our actors hair and makeup for the '50s scenes. We also went down to the department a few times to see if we could talk to the teacher but she wasn't in that day, so weren't able to get anyone to do hair and makeup for our actors. Me and Amiliyah also got in touch with Sophie and Kate as soon as possible to ask if they were able to do the type of makeup we wanted for the advert, as well as the hair, and they were fine with doing that. So, it wasn't a huge problem we had but it would've made the actors look even more like they were from the '50s. This was a fault of mine and I'm not trying to blame anyone else for that but I was the one who had to handle of the work on my own and I had so much paperwork to do and forgot all about getting in touch with the hair and makeup department so, I wasn't exactly happy about that but it happened and we did find another solution.

After sorting out hair and makeup with the two actors, me and my group then got onto talking about the plan of action for tomorrow. Going through everything from set dressing to timings and getting in touch with everyone again to make sure they were able to do the advert at the given times. We also went through what everyones jobs for tomorrow was and what everyone needed to do, just to make sure we were all on the same page and that everything was clear and understandable. 
One of the actors that we had cast for the advert, Sam Liddell, wasn't actually able to be in our advert as he was busy during the times we were filming. After finding that out, Sam helped us to find a replacement for him which was another a student from our class, James Foster. So, this wasn't a massive issue and the problem was resolved very quickly. As soon as I got in touch with James, I told him what costume to bring in for the next day and sent him my address. We were definitely lucky that he was able to do it and I have to thank Sam for helping us cast James and also thanks to James for being able to be part of our advert on such short notice.

We were meant to have a little girl play the cousin in the scene, but I had accidentally messed up the day that the actress was meant to come in for. I thought she was free around the times we were going to be shooting and it ended up that she was busy. So, we just had to change the '50s scene around a bit and work around only having one child in it, luckily this wasn't as big an issue as we thought it was going to be. I still really blame myself for mucking that up but luckily, we still had all of our cast being able to do the advert, and also being able to get a replacement for Sam.


Thursday 5th December 2019 - Shoot Day 1

Cast:

• Young Girl (young version of Grandma) - Libby Greer
• Mother - Kate Drummond
• Father - James Foster
• Auntie - Sophie Ashcroft
• Uncle - Tom Swales

We were meant to have a little girl play the cousin in the scene, but I had accidentally messed up the day that the actress was meant to come in for. So, we just had to change the '50s scene around a bit and work around only having one child in it, luckily this wasn't as big an issue as we thought it was going to be. 

This was definitely an eventful day. For me personally, I felt this shoot day wasn't very successful and didn't go the way I hoped it would. It seemed everything just went wrong as soon as we got to filming it. The actors were amazing with us though, being very patient as we were trying to sort out how shots were going to be and were the camera was going to be placed. But, filming and getting on with the production was a nightmare. 

Set dressing was the least stressful part of the whole shoot. At the beginning of the day, we had gone into college at 1:00 pm (when our lesson would be, we got permission to be able to go and get everything setup), got the equipment we needed (camera, microphone, reflector, steady cam, camera light, battery and tripod) in the studio and headed back to my car to then go to the location we were filming at. We didn't start filming until around 4:15 pm, so we had a good 3 hours to get the house looking as much like a house from the 1950s. I had gone to the house an hour before meeting up with my group at college, to start moving around some of the items in the house and also to find some toys we could use for the background, as well as being played with in the scene. We also wrapped a few more presents to put around the tree and some for the auntie and uncle to bring with them to give to the family. We had the actual TV stand covered with an old curtain, as the TV stand was too modern to be in the '50s, and we put the '50s TV on top with a few candles and some tinsel around to decorate it a bit as it was looking quite bare. Luckily, my auntie had already decorated the house for Christmas and we left the ornaments she put on the mantelpiece above the fire place. 

We also made sure, as we had actual candles on the mantelpiece and the window sill that they were out of the way of the actors, and also in shots we wouldn't have them anywhere near the candles. All the candles were either in a glass jar or behind a decoration, still visible, but they weren't able to harm any of the actors if they were to go near the candles. We had LED tea lights around the room as well which weren't a huge health risk, but they were used to replace some of the real candles that were exposed and could possibly harm the actors. We also made sure props and equipment were out of the actors' way so that they couldn't trip over or injure themselves on them. 

At 15:50, me and my mum went to go and pick up James and Tom up from college to then take over to my auntie's house for filming. As we arrived, a few minutes later Sophie and Kate had arrived and we were all set to get onto filming. Everyone's costumes looked absolutely perfect for the advert as well, along with their hair and makeup as we were quite worried about this. But, Sophie and Kate did a really great job with everything they had to do for their characters. 

As we started filming it was all going really well, I was a bit nervous about directing as this was the first ever project we had ever done and having the authority to direct people scared me a little bit. After a little while I did get better with helping the actors, especially Libby as she was really shy and nervous around everyone, so I needed to find ways of getting her out of her shell and help her to get to know everyone whilst filming.

Into the middle of shooting I did start to get quite confused as one of the members of the group started to go against the shot list and started making shots of their own, so I was really off track, as was the camera operator. I knew we had to change some shots around as we had to scrap one of the characters in the scene, but this member started fully changing all of the shots. The group members also didn't get any shots of the side with the TV on it, so we didn't even get to see It's a Wonderful Life in the '50s scene and it was a waste for me to buy that and not even have it used in the actual advert. My job was then taken over by said member as I was left in the dark and not able to pick up what parts of the scene we were on. This showed that there was a lack of communication, as I would ask a group member a question and they would either not understand what was going on, like me, or over-complicate what we were actually filming and would start taking over mine and the camera operator's job. This also did start some confrontation between me and the group member as I was meant to be the Director and they stole my job from me and was also being very disrespectful towards me, and pretty much pushing me out of the production of the advert. 

Near to the end of the shoot, the camera suddenly ran out of charge. Straight away I knew the reason to this and that was because Nathan, who was the Assistant Camera Operator, was playing about with the camera as we were dressing the set and he kept telling me the camera was fully charged when it obviously wasn't. So, we had to wait a little while for the battery to charge, we were also meant to bring a spare battery with us and forgot to (another problem with the shoot), and it was almost time for all the actors to leave. 

Because the actors needed to leave, which was absolutely fine and we didn't think this issue was going to happen and it was getting late, we had to film a few more of the important shots that we needed for the advert. We weren't able to do all of the shots that we wanted as we were running out of time and quickly had to do our most important shots, like the ending shot from the perspective of the camera taking a photo of the whole family. 

Everyone left at 18:20 and we couldn't thank them enough for being part of the advert and being very patient with us, they all did a really great job, especially my Libby who hadn't really acted in anything before doing this. I still wasn't very happy about what happened and was then worried for our next shooting day, as I felt this would happen again. It was even hard for me to put anything good about the shoot in our production report as I felt nothing went the way we wanted it to and didn't go to plan. 

As soon as we finished filming, we started clearing up my auntie's living room and having help from James and Tom which they didn't have to but we were very appreciative that they helped out. Just before the two left, we gave James some of the equipment as he was filming his advert tomorrow and took some of it home with me as I was going to help him out tomorrow as well. 

I just mainly hoped that we had enough footage to use for the '50s scene and that it was usable as well. 

Sunday 8th December 2019

As I was getting ready for the final shoot day, the next day, I started sorting out some more of the props for set dressing. 

Before doing all of that, we did get some bad news that both actors playing the grandchildren weren't able to make it to the shoot the next day. Luckily, we were able to get another girl to play the Granddaughter, Ruby Dawson, but we weren't able to find anyone to play the Grandson and had to cut the character out of the advert. I have to thank Emily for helping me cast her as she got in touch with her mum on such late notice and everything worked out alright in the end. 

I wrapped loads of presents, to go underneath the Christmas tree, and decorated them with bows and some had ribbon wrapped round them. I wanted there to be many presents and all of them to look neatly wrapped and covered with ribbons and bows as this scene is set on Christmas morning, and the beginning to Christmas Day for a family needs to be perfect. 

After finishing all of the presents, I then went into the garage to find loads of old toys that I had, as I wanted the children to look like they had been gifted with many toys, as they couldn't really open the props as they were all just empty boxes. So, I wanted loads of toys in the scene so the children could play with their new gifts, rather than opening an actual present. 

We were also never able to get a hold of an actual Polaroid camera, so I had to take matters into my own hands and try and make a prop one. Luckily, I found a template online of a Polaroid camera that I was able to print off. I first put it onto a word document to enlarge it as it was quite small. Once I had done that, I then printed it off, cut it all out and then started to fold and put all the pieces together. This didn't take long to do and was fairly easy.

The downside was that it was quite small and didn't look very real, but the prop wasn't really going to be in the advert for that long and we only needed something to be able to keep the story going. We also desperately needed the camera as it is one of the most important props in the whole of the advert, and this was the best we could do of resembling a Polaroid camera. 


Monday 9th December 2019 - Shoot Day 2 (Final Shoot)

Cast:

• Grandma - Sheila Laverick
• Mother - Emily Parvin
• Grandson - Archie Dawson
• Granddaughter - Ruby Dawson
• Father - Elliot Llewellyn

We were really lucky with getting Archie to play the grandson for the advert, as yesterday night we got in touch with the original actor's mum and she said he wasn't able to do the times we were filming, which was fine and we then just decided to scrap the character of the grandson. But when Ruby was getting dropped off out my house (our filming location), her mum had also brought along Archie and he was saying he would really like to be in the advert and we were more than happy to have him. He helped us out so much and he really did a great job acting, which was apparently his first time, and he even started helping me out a bit on set and pretty much replaced Nathan by becoming my 1st Assistant Director. Again, I think we were just really lucky with getting him to be a part of the advert, as well as all of the actors we cast, as for all of their first times acting in something like this they did the best they could. Sheila was definitely the star of the show as her acting was amazing, everything I directed her in she just did brilliantly and she was just very authentic and didn't exaggerate any of her performance. But again, I just wanted to thank all of the actors for participating, being very patient with us and doing a great job. 

But first, we started the day by going into college at 13:00 and started to edit the '50s scene together. This was very rough but it was still good to piece it all together first so it was ready to edit together with the present-day scenes. We also needed to look through some of the shots so that we could screenshot some of them to use for the scrapbook. We only got photos of our very first shot of the Grandma, when she was little, with her Mother, as that's the shot we wanted to trigger the Grandma's memory and then go into that photo and travel back in time. As well as getting the shot of the family photo at the very end of the '50s scene. So, we put them on a word document, put a black and white filter on them and then printed them off. 

There wasn't too much that we needed to worry about for keeping the actors safe and put of harms way, we mainly just needed to keep moving equipment and props out of the way, as we did have a lot in these scenes and just needed to keep making sure that the actors weren't going to trip over anything. We did have a real candle in the scenes but this wasn't anywhere near the actors to be able to be burnt by, and we also had the LED candles again to replace any real candles so that the actors didn't get hurt by them. 

Me and my group then left college at 14:45 to get the equipment we needed from the studio, same as the first shoot, and then headed to my mum's car to then get to my house and started setting up everything. All the actors weren't coming until after 16:00 so it gave us plenty of time to move furniture around, as well as decorations and props. We had also created some squares on a word document and coloured them green so we could cut them out and use as green screens in the scrapbook for when the camera goes through the photo and into the '50s. 

As soon as all the actors came and we had Archie become a new part of the cast, I then had to change the message in the scrapbook as we then had to add another name to know who the Grandma got her present from. I didn't have time to create a whole new page as we had just put the photos and green screen in the right order, so I had to find another solution to add this new characters name. I ended up just sticking some paper over the last name on the page, this didn't look great but from how far the shot was you could hardly see the mistake and the message isn't shown for too long either. 

As all the actors started to arrive, we first had to get a photo of Emily and Sheila together, to quickly print out, looking like a piece of film, and then putting it in the scrapbook. I made sure to print two out so we could have one for Archie to have after he takes the picture and one to stick in the scrapbook.

The biggest issue we had was that we started filming much, much later than we anticipated. Originally, we wanted to start filming at 16:30 and we pretty much had all the set the way we wanted it, but we ended up filming a whole hour later. This wasn't ideal as we didn't want to keep the actors late, especially Ruby and Archie as they had to go to school the next day. 

So, we pushed through filming and almost got all of the shots we wanted, we didn't get a shot of the Grandma holding the scrapbook to show the photo of the family at the very end of the '50s. We also didn't get one of the biggest shots of the advert which was a pivotal part in the story and was the shot that would present a message to audiences watching. I wasn't very happy about that but we did try to get as many of the shots that we had on the shot list as quickly as possible. There were a lot of shots that we wasted time on and either didn't need or weren't even going to use in the actual advert which I wasn't the happiest about. Another reason why we would take a long time on certain shots was because we were making sure the continuity from one shot to another was done alright, as we all learnt this from when we did out Bootcamp 101 projects from the beginning of the year.

I would say that one of the downsides was that one of our group members kept sitting around and wasn't helping we me and the camera operator needed it in scenes, causing me to get aggravated and starting a conflict between me and this particular group member. Now and again they would be pretty disrespectful towards me, as I was doing all the work and they didn't do anything which I wasn't happy about, again, during this production and having a repeat of the first shoot day. 

We got all of the shots with Ruby and Archie finished by 18:30. I felt really bad about them staying for so late and made sure they had something to eat and drink before they left and again we couldn't thank them enough for being in the advert and doing an amazing job. We did also make sure throughout the production that they were having breaks in between takes or were either on standby to do a shot. They were both so patient with us and we were all very thankful for that. Elliot had also finished with all of his shots as he was mainly with the children in the advert and isn't really seen in any of the other shots. 

After the 3 actors left, we still had quite a lot of shots to do with Sheila and Emily. We finished all of this at 19:40 and Amiliyah had to leave just a little after the 3 actors had left, which wasn't a massive issue. We tried to get through all of these shots as quickly as possible, and I think this was done really well as Sheila and Emily were then the only 2 actors left and were able to deliver really great performances without having so many eyes on them. 

Nearing to the end of filming, the battery ran out of charge. The good thing was that we remembered a spare battery this time round, the bad thing was the battery didn't fit and we quickly charge the used battery as we didn't have much left to film and had enough battery to then film the rest of the advert. Again, both the actors were great as they were really patient with us. After we had finished, me and Nathan started clearing up the living room, there really wasn't much to clear up but we mainly just needed to move the furniture back to its original place. Just before Nathan left, I told him to take the tripod home so he could bring it in the next day, to take back to the studio, and I kept the rest of the equipment with me and charged the battery up. 

Now I just hoped that all the editing would go well and that the footage from today was all going to look good for the advert. 

Tuesday 10th December 2019 (Editing)

As we had now finally finished the advert, we then got onto editing and this was actually much tougher than we thought it was going to be. 

Because we hadn't really used the scene timings and never really properly worked out what the length the advert would be, which was a big mistake, the advert was much longer than we anticipated. 

Me and Amiliyah first put all the shots that we needed into a file and then started to put them onto the Adobe Premiere Pro application. We started to put all the shots in order and cutting them down to make them either shorter or to make them add up to the previous shot. This was when we started seeing that the advert was going to be way too long, even though we were going to cut more out of it, it was still too long for an advert that would be shown on TV. 

As we had pieced all of the shots together, we tried to do the green screen for the photos of the scrapbook pages, we got help with this from Tom, who was in our advert. This then became an issue as the shots we had of the green-screen on the pages would move from Sheila's shoulder and close up on the green-screen, this was an issue as it was much harder for us to be able to put the photo onto the green-screen and to make it look centre on the page. So, we then had to scrap the green-screen idea and come up with another plan of how we would show the transition from the present time to the picture/memory from the '50s.

Me and Amiliyah then figured out a solution to this problem and remembered we had a few shots of Sheila holding the scrapbook with the actual photo on the page and not just the green block. But, we did only have the shot when she is looking through the scrapbook and lands on the first photo of the grandma and her mum in the '50s and never got one for the last photo of the whole family from the '50s, so we had to try and find a way around coming out from the photo/memory without having that shot. 

I think me and Amiliyah did a really good job of working around this dilemma as the advert actually started to look much better without the green-screen transitions. We worked around this by having the last shot of Sheila looking overwhelmed by the photo and faded it to black, to then fade from black to the memory/photo coming to life from the '50s. As we wanted it to look like the actual photo first, we first had a black and white filter on the shot, cut the shot in half and had that other half in colour. We then put a transitioning effect in between the cut to make the black and white shot, slowly transition into the coloured shot. We also did this for the family photo at the end but vice versa. This worked really well for us and it ended up looking better than what we had originally planned in mind of the green-screen. 

We started to fit all the music together and realised that the advert was much longer than the song we were using, Yesterday cover by Connie Talbot.

As we had to leave college for the end of the day, we still needed to figure out what we were going to keep and take out of the advert as it all came around to almost 4 minutes. So, the plan for the next day was to try and cut as much as possible to make the advert shorter, but still keeping the important shots that tell the story. 


Wednesday 11th December 2019 (Editing)

As soon as I got into college, I got straight onto editing and did it all on my own for the whole lesson. All I did, and mainly needed to do, was to cut down more of the advert. By the end of the lesson, I had got the advert down to 3 minutes and 17 seconds but still needed to cut it down even further. 

I had also sorted out the music for the advert, still having the cover of Yesterday but only for the present-day scenes. I went onto YouTube and found an instrumental piano version of the song and started to cut this and piece it together for the '50s scene. This worked really well as the piano melody sounded much more cheerful than the Yesterday cover, and having that melody in the Grandma's happiest memories helped create a much more heart-warming scene. I also got help from Nathan with the music for him to listen to my rough cut of the music and then help me develop it. 

I also worked on making the '50s scene look much older and look like it had a type of vintage camera filter on it, this was some feedback we had got from our teacher to be able to create this effect of going back in time and also looking back on a much older memory. So, in the morning I found an easy tutorial on YouTube, by Austin Newman, that created a vintage camera look by the colour grading. 

Here's the link to the tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLx8D1fSMtY&t=2s

I just followed the instructions he gave in the video and applied them to our advert, it was also very easy to follow along. The pictures below show the before and after of using this colour grading technique, the shots don't match up to each other but the lighting was the same in all of the '50s shots and you can then understand how much the grading changed the look and feel of the shots. 

We had also decided because the advert ends with the shot of It's a Wonderful Life on the TV, that we would have the part of dialogue from the film's most famous scene when George Bailey runs down the streets of Bedford Falls and yells "Merry Christmas!". So, we added this little bit of dialogue to the end of the advert when the slogan and John Lewis and Waitrose logos come up. I also ended up adding in his yells of joy as the "Merry Christmas" part was quite short and I wanted the sound to only fade when the logos and slogan fades out fully. 

So, the plan for the next day was to try and cut the advert down even more.


Thursday 12th December 2019 (Editing)

This was our final day of finishing the edit for our advert. The advert ended up still being too long and came to around 2 minutes 30 seconds. This could be fine because when John Lewis adverts go onto the YouTube platform, they are usually this length, but because the brief said this is an advert that would have to be seen on TV, this would have been way too long. We wanted to try and chop it down to 30 seconds so that we had the long version that would be fine for YouTube and also have the version for TV but we didn't have enough time to do that, and we weren't able to do so. 

But, me and Amiliyah finished the advert together. We both just started to cut out many shots that weren't important to the story and also cutting down more of the shots that had excess on them, and they didn't need to be too long. So, we had cut it down as much as possible and got it to an average John Lewis advert time. 

The hardest part then was trying to get all the music to fit into the advert, as now the cover of Yesterday was a little longer than the advert, and it was hard to try and edit it at a good point in the song and to be able to have the ending of the song link to the actual end of the advert before the logo and slogan appear. So, me and Amiliyah had to work around trying to find the best part of the song to cut off and add the ending to, which was really difficult but we were able to manage it and it worked really well in the advert. We also had to cut the instrumental piano melody from the '50s scene, as we had cut a lot of shots from that scene and the song didn't fit right into the cut down version. This wasn't too big an issue as now we were just able to use the whole of the Yesterday cover, which we originally wanted to do anyways. 

In the end, I thought the advert looked great and we did the best we could on it, having a few technical difficulties along the way. But, I think we came over those obstacles really well and found alternatives to better our advert. 

A Trip Down Memory Lane

*Sent my evaluation to my teachers