The Brief
Create a 60 second (max) live action advert
YOUTUBE | 1280 x 720 MP4 H264 CODEC
Presentation on 14th Jan – deck (pptx) with video embedded
Rules:
NO LIGHTBULBS
NO DRAWING HANDS
NO PENCIL BEHIND THE EAR
Brainstorming | Initial Ideas
The simplicity of this brief meant having a lot of freedom with little instruction. With this in mind, my initial thoughts were very sparce which led to confusion. In order to gain inspiration, I created a Pinterest mood-board of key imagery which helped spark ideas for the brief.
The pencil is an object which is so integrated in our daily lives that we can forget its significance and role. Therefore, to continue brainstorming, I listed the pros and cons of a pencil which led onto thoughts about its durability, shape, texture and weight. The brief outlined avoiding filming hands, so I thought about personifying the pencil and having it move/ play the role of a human.
‘Dancing pencils’ came to mind, so I researched YouTube videos for inspiration. While I was watching a video of a man creating dancing pencils, an idea came to mind of creating Parkour Pencils.
This idea is exciting and funny which will attract the audience’s attention. Parkour is an energetic, free-minded sport which involves using technique and concentration/ a centred mind. The parkour parody from The Office US (2005) is a comedy sketch where different members of the team become obsessed with the concept of doing parkour that they run around shouting ‘Parkour!’ and performing minor stunts and moves. This reference influenced the comedic aspect within PencilParkour.
Filming
Before filming, I went through the plan and storyboard with a helper. We discussed the achievability and how to best optimise each scene. Due to the COVID restrictions, the supplies and location were limited, but I made use of the available resources on hand and the final product was better than anticipated.
Location | The filming took place in my back-garden and shed.
Materials | The materials we used were pencils, Sellotape, fishing wire, concrete slabs, wooden rods and Blu-Tack.
Filming Equipment | The project was filmed with an iPhone 7, and a Samsung when the battery died. We used a long wooden rod to attach the fishing wire and pencils to, in order to film at a distance.
The Idea | To create a parkour scene with pencils and to have them perform tricks. The pencils would flip, run and jump with see-through fishing wire and manually.
The advert would be published with the tagline ‘Post your tricks’ and hashtag #PencilParkour to involve audience participation and to create a social media trend.
Clients could replace the pencil with their own branded range and change fonts/ transitions to incorporate the company style into the advert. The advert follows an original idea and its comedic and fresh storyline will have a ‘trending’ success.
Pencil tricks reference – https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=kHbFJ7Cst7c
Editing
Music | Having followed parkour social media pages, two principle video styles caught my attention which were the fresh drum and bass style, and the rough rock music style.
To examples of this are ‘Paris Rooftop Parkour POV’, where the music has a fresh sound and the visuals are clean cut and in time with the music, and then ‘The World’s Best Parkour and Freerunning’ which focuses more on different examples of moves with disjointed video shots.
When looking for copyright free music, I used pages such as Pixabay, Audiomusic, Bensound and YouTube. Bensound was a great website to use, however I didn’t find the right track style for the advert. When looking on YouTube, I found many parkour videos have used copyright free music and added the links in their captions. This is how I discovered a playlist of free music with my chosen song ‘HOPEX – Warrior’ used in the advert. ‘HOPEX – Warrior’ is an energetic track which flowed perfectly in time with my parkour scenes.
Editing with Premiere Pro
Using Adobe Premiere Pro, I was able to modify the timing, length and volume of the music track and videos. I thoroughly enjoyed this process and was able to finish the editing in a day. Having worked with this program before, I have seen significant improvements with the speed and organisation when using it. With practise of using the basic tools on Premiere, I felt this experience was more immersive and enjoyable than in previous projects.
FONTS | The original plan was to have the title with a graffiti font, but having tested this I found the background interfered too much with the title. In order to avoid this, the titles font was changed to a bold ‘Phosphate’ and the tagline to a squiggly ‘SignPainter’.
LOGO | The logo was created by merging a shape of a pencil with fire (to represent the parkour movement) and the ‘PP’ initials for Pencil Parkour. This logo can be replaced with the clients company logo once the advert is launched.
YouTube PP tutorials were helpful guides when editing the advert, and I found new transition tools, special effects and short-cuts as a result. In previous projects I have used AE to create animations, and to export the files in the MP4 format I used Adobe Media Coder, whereas with PP the exporting process was far simpler.
The clients specifications were to export as an MP4 H264 CODEC with YouTube measurements 1280 x 720. I set the screen size at the beginning of the project to save time, so the exporting process was straight-forward. PencilParkour was shared on YouTube and presented in a University lecture.
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