Company Contacts

Contacting a company

I decided to send the link to our advert to the Nestle media section in order to get some feedback from them and to see what they thought about it. They haven't yet relplied however our advvert has been sent to them. Here is the email I sent them-

 Student Smarties Advert
4479 - Charlotte Hewitt


29 November 2012 10:22

Dear Sir/Madam
I am a media student from Esher College and have created a short advert for Smarties with two other people. For one of our projects we had to make an advert that was imaginative and original for a product of our choice. The advert is a stop motion animation film that we cretaed over the course of 2 weeks. The link to our advert is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmJiYfqUKYg , would it be possible for you to take a quick look at the advert and tell me what you think about it?
Thank You

Yours faithfully
Charlotte Hewitt

I think it's important to get your work shown to different people because they may have more ideas and different opinions about it. Our film is not to a proffesional standard however it is still good to get a proffesionals opinion of the storyline and the actual ideas involved.

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I also contacted a couple of advertising agencies who have produced adverts for TV before such as the 118 118 ad. I thought it would be good to get some proffesional feedback from the people who have had a lot of experience and can make some good points about the strengths and weaknesses of our film. The agencies I contacted were Pace Productions and Little but Big who are responsible for many great adverts. The email I sent to the two agencies is below-



Student Advert
4479 - Charlotte Hewitt
 
01 December 2012 20:55

From: 4479 - Charlotte Hewitt
Sent: 01 December 2012 20:47
To: info@paceproductions.co.uk
Subject: Student Advert
Dear Sir/Madam
I am a student currently studying Media BTEC at Esher College and have created a short advert about Smarties. As you are very experienced in the advertising sector it would be much appreciated if you could take a quick look at the advert and give some feedback about the strengths and weaknesses. The link to the advert is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmJiYfqUKYg .

Yours faithfully
Charlotte Hewitt


I sent our film to some experienced advertising companies based in London because I wanted to get some feedback about our film. I think it is important to get your film out to advertising agencies because you may not get a reply if you just send it to one because the company may be busy. Luckily I got a reply from Stephen Little who is responsible for 118 118, vodaphone, phones4U, Holland & Barrett, Tic Tac and many more advertisements. I was very surprised to see a reply because it is difficult to come into contact the proffesionals and the reply gave me some really good ideas.   

Hi Charlotte,




I liked the atmosphere in the live action.

The sound and the stop motion on the live action gave it a feeling of expectancy.
The casting was good and you wanted to know what was going to happen next.
Maybe it was a shame that it disapperaed into a very seperate animation sequence.
It felt a bit like two different films. The Smarties animation on the bench at the end worked much better.
It's more interesting when they inhabit the same world rather than a seperate studio.
I think the very best ads (Levis, Guiness, Skittles, Tango)  keep the storytelling going.
And the product ends up being the hero for bringing us a story that held our interest.
The very best commercials directors (Jonathan Glazer, Tony Kaye, Ridley Scott, Frederik Bond, Ivan Zacharias) all shoot little stories rather than ads.
Maybe your hero could have met a girl who rattled with smarties in her pocket  like him.
Maybe the rattling sound grows louder as they walk towards each other on a path in the park.
When they get close to each other a title appears "Smarty pants like smarty pants?". 
They walk past each other. But then both turn around at the same time to check each other out.
Maybe a heart animates on a park bench from lots of smarties packs.
But probably better to just end simply on a rattling pack of smarties on the bench and an end line like "Live life to a rattle."
Or another idea,  maybe he takes the smarties back to the shop because the rattle is too loud for him and people are looking at him.
The shopkeeper shakes his head and tells him to "man up" and hands him the smarties back. It could be a silent film with the dialogue titled. Your stop motion would look if you turned it into black and white.
But what do I know. I never actually directed a commercial. So you're already one step ahead of me.
And the more you shoot the better you get.
Trust your own instincts.
And never take any one piece of advice as gospel.
Because it's always more likely that you're listening to an idiot rather than a genius.

Steve

I took into consideration the feedback and ideas of Stephen Little because he has had a lot of experience and must know what he's talking about. I learnt a lot from this, such as we could have concentrated on making the storyline clearer and possibly connected the two animations with better transitions. He gave some good suggestions, in particular we could have thought of including a second character of a different gender. I think this would have been good because we chose to aim the animation at both boys and girls and it may have appealed more to a girl if we actually included one.



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