George Pratt

Unit 4, 5 and 62 – Assignment 2 – Task 3a Proposal

I have been tasked to create a promotional DVD for the Extended Creative Media course - to be sent out to prospective students who may want to join the college at the start of the coming year. In this proposal I will briefly explain the following: content, target audience, resources, personnel, budget and product schedule. For the project we have been following the brief:

“Your tender has been successful! You now have to produce planning documentation for the digital video sequence and liaise with your client throughout the process to ensure the client is happy with the designs you are preparing.”

Firstly and most importantly we had to decide what content we wanted within the DVD. This was a long drawn out process between both myself and the rest of the team. We also took the clients feedback into consideration in order to minimise changes later on down the line. Firstly we wanted to know exactly how the video would be laid out. This means we needed to decide what would be shown on screen at any specific point. For example what would be used to open the video, and what would be used in the interview. Most of this had been covered in the shot logs, which is what we would use to organize and shoot the pictures; there is also some guidance in the storyboards. A brief outline of the content will be explained below:

Interviews with students and staff. Shots of the college. Time lapse of the journey from the main entrance to the creative media area. Graphics featuring college logo. Images of students walking around college.

We want the content to be friendly for all audiences and backgrounds, meaning it will be very broad and easily accessible. This means shots of the college and of students, although this may be quite boring and lacking personality, it does mean more people would be able to watch the DVD, meaning it is more successful.

Because this DVD is being used to promote the college and attract high school students, it is going to need to be effective at putting the college in a good light for students from ages 16-17. This means we thought carefully about what people in this age group would like to see, and what might make them choose Cheadle and Marple College over any other college in the area. It is always a good idea to make sure the promotional media used to attract people to something is fitting of the typical audience that the product/service may attract. I have compiled a short list as to what I thought when planning the promotional product:

Relevant to the course – It is very important to make sure all information about the course is 100% factual and true to the course, as it would be unfair to students if the course was completely different to how it was portrayed in the DVD.

Suitable for the age group – When creating the DVD it will need to be suitable for people around the age of 16. We took this very seriously as complaints will look unfavourably upon the college.

George Pratt

Making sure equipment is fit for purpose – However I finally decide to create my DVD I will need to make sure it is able to be created with the equipment and software in the college. For example I will not be able to use advanced CGI or helicopter shots as these kinds of things are not feasible in college.

A suitable length – The promotional DVD will have to be a good length to both keep people interested and to be long enough to get all of the information across. I have decided my video will be from 3-5 minutes long as I feel this time frame will be capable of fitting all of the information in, whilst still keeping people interested throughout.

There are a number of resources we have access to in the college. Things such as machines to edit the raw footage on are easy to come by, meaning we can edit and change the video whenever we want. We also have access to camera equipment; specifically the video camera and the tripod to make sure the shots are still.

As for the personnel, there is no one that will need to be paid to feature on the video; however we need to make sure that people have consented to appearing on the video, this means that we will need to ask them before we choose to film them. The crew consists of me, Ben and Tom. We have each designated a role for the filming, I am camera operator, Tom is director and Ben is in charge of logging and noting all the shots. With this crew I feel we will be able to produce a good standard of shots. We do not need to take into consideration any budget as all of the things that would usually be considered costly would have been covered by the college.

The project schedule is the most important aspect of all the planning. It means we will be kept on track throughout the project, and we will know when to have certain aspects completed by, and know when to have the video done.

Each aspect of the project has been given a reasonable time to be completed. This isn’t absolutely guaranteed as we cannot know when we will actually complete certain tasks. It is important we stick to this schedule as it means we will finish in the correct time.