Shooting a Puma Ad
While dividing work amongst the team, we decided I would be the one to shoot and edit our film opening since I dabbled in filming and editing videos previously. Thus I thought it would be wise if I create a couple projects on my own so to polish my skills.
I did not want to shoot a short film at first due to the weight that task carried along with doing this on my own. So I landed on creating a commercial for Puma.
To look for inspiration, I turned to Youtube and it's galore of commercial archives. I watched past commercials for numerous acclaimed shoe brands such as nike, adidas, converse, vans and more. All of these commercials had youthful and fast-paced elements to convey an aura of pace and efficiency in a stylish manner which I then tried to mimic in my commercial.
At this point I did not own a camera but a small setback such as that could not stop me. iPhone ka camera zindabad! (long live iPhone cameras). I used my phone in cinematic mode to shoot the clips. Gathering a team of actors who in fact did not know how to play basketball, we went to our school's basketball courtyard to shoot our commercial. Quickly did I realise that shots of this team playing basketball will not be enough simply because most of them needed to be scrapped due to my mistake of not choosing actors who could play the sport. Nevertheless, the show must go on! Asking help from students engaged in their respective sports, I obtained enough shots to start editing.
I edited the ad on Capcut mobile. I did not have much faith in the shots leading to a quality commercial but soon realised the power of post-production. I picked an audio out from Youtube and initiated my editing process. The shots were well composed however only small snippets turned out to have the quality I required. This worked in my favour due to this being a shoe commercial, which have a tendency to have speedy elements. Using smaller clips, an engaging sound choice, vivid colour grading and captivating text choices; I ended up creating a fairly decent ad for my first attempt.
For some extra practice, I attempted some product photography alongside shooting the commercial. For the first poster, I just set up the shoes in the school's courtyard and took some photos on my iPhone's Portrait mode whilst for the second photo I created a backdrop using black chart paper and cutting up some coloured sheets of similar colours as to the shoes to enhance the presence of the shoes to elevate the brand. I colour graded them in iPhone's default editor and added text and logos in Canva.
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In the second product photo, I realized the importance of lighting. I used the sun outside to light the shoes however the black chart paper was reflective and thus looked rusty. Sunlight also led the shoe to look very bright and saturated which is fitting for certain brands such as children's clothing stores but I thought that for a brand like Puma, the lighting should be more cinematic through varying lights and shadows which required artificial lighting I did not have at the time.
All in all, from this preliminary I learned numerous lessons which I later used in my final tasks. Lessons such as the importance of casting well, the power of post-prodution, the impact of lighting, placement of products, basic editing and camerawork and more.