Blog post 18: My rough cut

We decided to do a rough cut after the first weekend on premiere using the footage we had filmed the weekend before. This allowed us to watch through our footage in the context of our whole adverts and understand what had problems or what was fine to keep. Reshoots the following weekend were mainly based on these rough edits.

My rough cut for my 1st ad

My rough cut for my 2nd ad

From this I found out what I wanted to change.
In my first advert I wanted to adjust some of the mise en scene of the breakfast shots, making sure there were spoons laid out on the table when they sat to eat. To further show that the ad is set in the morning I decided I wanted my actors to wear proper pyjamas for the actual shoot and to wear their outdoor clothes for the car shot onward. I then decided to film the car shot more from the front as well as I figured this would look better. I also figured I would adjust the pacing on the final pancake shot and quickly pan to her looking at the pancakes.

I wanted a generally faster pace for the second advert with a more upbeat, energetic voice-over. I also wanted a shot of my actor opening up the burger box and eating it, as well as making sure the bag the food came in was properly branded. I framed the shot of the delivery itself through a window as there was little space, however I planned to redo this shot and make sure the camera had enough space to give a better shot. The rough cut also showed me the importance of de-cluttering your shot, which made sure to do in my final advert.

This was almost like a second practice advert however it was much more useful as many of the technical limitations we had for the previous shoot were fixed by having the proper cameras and editing software meaning we had full focus on the content of the shots themselves. Many of things were also done in this rough cutting stage making the final edit take a lot less time as we didn't have to completely start from scratch.