1. Reflection questions
By: KeShonna Jackson

2. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
Our product uses conventions by using a tacky marketing strategy, of showing how your product is better than another. We challenge the conventions a bit by using the same background music, instead of changing the slow, ballad holiday song to a happier song when our product is shown. In our video, we shame another brand of cologne, to prove how ours is better. We subconsciously show the social idea of how if you don’t have good hygiene, or a certain kind of hygiene, people would not want to be near you. Basically that smell is a big factor in likability. When the first guy sprays the cologne and the people walk away, the guy is sad. However, when the other guy sprays our product, AXE, the people come towards him, and they like him, which supports that. We also use the idea of the holidays by using santa hats and making our slogan ‘The Best PreScent’ which is a play on words since it is a cologne, and a great holiday gift.

3. How does your product engage with audience and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
Our project engages with the audience. Initially, it is holiday themed. Everybody loves the holidays, and a holiday themed commercial is more likely to attract people than a regular commercial. Also, it deals with AXE, a men’s hygiene product, and hygiene products are almost essential to live in everyday society. The content engages with the audience by giving them something to relate to, and being appealing to their likes and thoughts. Additionally, the slogan for our product is witty and rhyming, which is more engaging. As a real media text, since is an advertisement, it would typically be distributed on television. A 30 second commercial during the breaks in between films and tv shows. The holiday theme would narrow down the time of year it would be featured, only between the months of November to the end of December. It could also be played before videos on Youtube, or as other general pop up advertisements on websites. This gets the word of the product out there, and attracts people to buy your product.

4. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
For filming in this project, personally, I filmed a lot more. This develops my camera skills by giving me practice with the camera, ultimately getting better with each take. Also, in our last project, we used iMovie, which was different from the editing software we used this time, Pinnacle Studios which is a little more complicated. We navigated through that software, and I learned how to remove sound from videos, use only the sound from other videos, and convert videos into files from the Internet. I also learned how to use effective transitions; there was a broader range of them in this software. Adding non-diegetic sound that was more than just a song was probably the most developed skill throughout the project. We effectively incorporated background music s well as self created audio that was separate from the actual video. Furthermore as far as editing, we also added text to our video, which was another first. Overall, my production skills are expanding as we incorporate more factors in our project and with each general practice.

5. How did you integrate technologies-software, hardware, and online-in this project?
Our group integrated several technologies in this project. For filming, we used the video camcorder with a tripod. We transferred the footage from the camera to a desktop computer using the SD card where our footage was and an SD card reader. For our voiceover, we also used the same method of filming and transferring. The editing software we used was Pinnacle Studios, where we edited the audio, videos and clips, putting them together to make our final commercial. As for online technologies, we used YouTube to get the background music for our product. We used an instrumental of a song that was posted on the site, and used another website to convert it to an mp3 file so we can easily use only the audio and add it to our video. We also recorded the whole process of our video through blogging. Our blogs were done and posted on WordPress.com.