After a short production period, our Beats commercial is finally finished. Looking back on the project, there are many aspects of it that are important to note. Though imperfect, it was a great learning experience for what's to come.
The product utilizes almost all of the major motifs seen in Beats ads. Starting with a short scene that has no non-diegetic sound, the character is introduced and he is seen putting on and turning on the Beats Solo3 headphones. This is a direct parallel to the ads in the brand's latest series of advertisements for the Beats Fit Pros, in which several different celebrities are showcased before and after they put on headphones. While both the professional Beats ads and our product use ambient sound to emphasize the quality of the headphones, our commercial adds a fade-out effect to it to display the noise-canceling feature of the Beats. Additionally, the Beats connecting noise is played when the character turns the headphones on to add a layer of iconography that will stick in the viewer's head. The commercial follows one character going about various tasks with the headphones on, showcasing their versatility and longevity. This is another callback to the Beats Fit Pros series, which showcases celebrities doing the same thing, mainly what they are known for like making music or playing tennis. Unlike the Beats Fit Pros series, which uses the song Magic by Vince Staples in all of its ads, we chose Hoe Cakes by MF DOOM. The change is credited to two things, our audience and our reference list. The song used in the product is beloved by all of the teammates along with many in our age group, which the ad is targeting. Additionally, its use calls on the Beats Studio Buds: Its the Music series, which utilizes the favorite song of the celebrity used in each video. At the end of the ad, the Beats logo along with the sentence "Up to 48 hours of battery life" fades in and out. All the Beats ads we reviewed showcased the logo and one or more features the headphones had to emphasize what the ad was displaying.
The commercial represents teenagers in an attempt to sell to them. The casual clothing, common activities (studying, playing basketball, hanging out with friends), and popular song all showcase the life of an average American teenager. More specifically, the average black male in his teen years. The product represents this group along with a feature that they would find valuable - a long battery life. Teenagers today are stereotypically impatient, tech-savvy, on-the-go people. They do not desire the same things in their products as other age groups, who may need friendlier user interfaces or features that would aid in their professions. What teens need is a reliable product that won't die on them - and our product gives them just that. If it were a real media text, it would most likely be distributed on platforms where two things converge - teenagers and music. This means applications like Tiktok, Youtube, Apple Music, etc would be vital to the ad campaign.
Making a commercial was a great way to establish and hone my production skills. The editing process taught me what was and wasn't important in a project. Many things were changed or cut to prioritize the flow of the project. A major goal of the product was for things to seem natural. Operating under that consensus taught me the boundaries that needed to be maintained within editing to obtain a certain feeling.
Throughout the editing process, various methods were tried to find what would work for the project. We settled on Videoleap, an app available for both IOS and android products. It offers the ability to edit both audio and visual effects, so it was perfect for our purpose. The entire project was edited using the app. In order to get the Beats connecting sound, a small microphone was needed to get inside our prop and record the audio. This microphone just so happened to be another pair of headphones, which were able to fit perfectly in the ear of the Beats Solo3s. Getting the song was a much simpler process. Using the screen recording feature on my iPhone, I screen-recorded the clip of the song that we wanted. I then cut down and extracted the audio from the recording in Videoleap in order to add it to our project. Online resources provided the logo and font of the text at the end of the video.
Overall, making the Beats commercial taught me many things about the creative process that goes into media production. From shooting the scenes to editing them, each moment is baked with intention. Even amateur productions like ours take a high level of work and dedication. I hope to use what I have learned to create even better products in the future.
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