Mini Post: An Ad for 20-Time Python; Because Why Not?

20-time python isn't the only thing I'm currently doing in my media literacy class. There is myriad of things I have to do alongside this blog, which will normally range from essays and worksheets, to projects like videos and presentations, but recently they both have collided for my advertising final. We were assigned to produce a 30 second ad to explain what our 20-time projects were all about, using persuasion techniques such as logos (an appeal to logic), ethos ( an appeal to ethics), and pathos (a appeal to emotions), along with common ad archetypes. Normally I wouldn't have even mentioned something like this, but since I *may* get some extra credit, I might as well do it.

    It's kind of okay, isn't it? The voice over wasn't good quality and the camera work wasn't too nice, but it turned out much better than I expected. I was using an original iPhone 5 to film the commercial so the video and audio wasn't too nice, but it did the job. The nice thing about using the phone for filming is that it was small enough that I could place it precariously on boxes in order to get optimal viewing angles of me and the monitor screens. You can kinda see the effects this in the "check us out:" IDLE bit, where both the camera and my laptops LCD screen were shaking at the start of the scene. I made the video pan up in software, to try to hide it.

    Something that surprised me during this assignment was the quality of the audio from the iPhone. It has the expected hiss that you would typically get from a phone recording but when I spoke, I sounded very soft and weaselly. I was expected it to be a little bit crisper, but that's probably what I get for using a phone instead of an actual camera.

    The thing that rescues a project isn't the camera, but the video editing software. Typically other students would use a video editor like WeVideo on their phones and computers, but I opted for something much more different and archaic: Windows Movie Maker. Sure it's been unsupported by Microsoft, but it still works. Sure, it can only output videos at what probably isn't a resolution of 1080p, but I'm familiar with it. Sure, I can't dub music on top of the voice recording without exporting and reloading it, but I can make it fade in and out nice enough. I found it to be much nicer to use than having to learn the basics of WeVideo for something that needed to be done in a small amount of time. Learning how to use WeVideo probably would have been the better long term choice, but with something that took me part of the afternoon to make, It felt that it would have been a bit trivial at best.

The background music by the way, is Parallax by LEMMiNO

Here is a link to it if your interested.