Young Minds Evaluation

Our task was to create an advert about a charity to help teenage issues. We decided to have the main issue as depression. Our target audience was mainly aimed at teenagers. The email address is featured so teenagers who need the help can actually gain it. However, it could be aimed at adults because they can help teenagers and also look out for those who might need the help. We looked at multiple adverts online to get an idea of how to create it. These days, there are many things affecting many different people so we chose a well-known issue to help promote our charity. We chose the name Young Minds. It is already a charity and we thought it goes well with our concept.

1)  Once being put into groups we were happily given the topic 'Teen issues". From this started point we initially thought of bullying and depression, soon after researching the "young mind" advert we took inspiration from that at extended the idea of 'depression' further. Our main target audience were high school kids struggling with loneliness, feeling unwanted and worthless, an issue that has massively spread across the world. By creating a youtube video we knew this would be the best way to attract our audience, in our video we wanted to show the same perspective that sense of feeling alone and not fitting in. We decided by creating young minds it would make us feel closer to the target audience and make them feel more connected to our story, all in hope to make them feel comfortable to come and receive help from our charity 'Young Minds". 

2) Who did you work with and how did you divide the research, planning, filming and responsibilities?
In my group was Josh Spencer, Harriet Putt and Emily Benham. In our planning, we gave out different roles to our team. A few examples are editor, cameraman and actors as well as other small jobs such as getting props and making a filming schedule. By giving each other a role, we were able to divide the research work. This meant each member of our group were responsible for at least one feature, getting everyone involved. For filming, we had one main cameraman and the rest of the group added in opinions and ideas to get the best shot for the scenes.

3) How did you plan your sequence?
We planned our sequence by looking at different charity adverts and we took inspiration from them. We made our advert black and white to reinforce the emotion that the advert is meant to give out. We planned our shots according to what places were available to us, so the classroom scene was filmed when there were people in the media room to contribute as actors. We used canted shots, close ups and tracking shots to create a direction, connection and power with the main actor and message.

4) What research and planning did you undertake?

We researched three other similar existing adverts for similar topics, depression and mental health, and took some ideas on how to piece together an advert raising awareness for a real life problem that affects so many. With these three videos we evaluated them to see the good effective parts and what could be improved. As well as this we created a storyboard to see how the different scenes would look when pieced together and if we could put the scenes in a different order to improve the video.

6) Identify what went well and with hindsight what you do to improve/ do differently.
The whole idea of our video worked well with our project of a charity for teen issues. Also, the black and white effect sets the mood and our actress played the part well and was very convincing. Next time, our group could do more scenes is a range of places. This would allow more people to relate to this message instead of just teenagers suffering at school. 

7) What have you learnt from completing this task? 
What we have learnt is how to compromise and communicate our ideas which allowed us to discuss them when we had free periods to film and when we were available to edit the footage. Also, we learnt how we should film each scene as each of us gave our own ideas to each other and we gave one another the opportunity to experiment with different shots.

8) Looking ahead, how will this learning be significant when completing your future productions?

This production will teach me that the effects you put onto your project is very important as it can completely change the personality of the advert alongside the music which changes the whole aspect of the performance. As well as this the different camera angles and shots can create a dramatic effect amongst the audience. Also, for future projects I will know to set roles for each of my group so the work is evenly set out and everyone gets to be involved.