Task 5

Evaluation:

For my advert, I chose to make it based on a Macbook Pro. I did this because last year I modeled a Macbook Pro in Blender as a personal project, but I didn't end up doing anything with it other than the plain image. I also wanted to give myself a project that would take me outside of my comfort zone within Blender. Throughout my time in Blender I have barely touched animation other than animating the camera movement. Although the Macbook animation was not much I feel like it is a good start to working with key frames. When it comes to the target audiences for my Macbook ad, I aimed to make this advert directed to students. I imagine students are the type to be looking for one. I think this because Macbooks are considered really good for things like video editing or photo editing, or for just general use, so students are the more likely to invest in one. Especially if they are into editing in some way or are assigned a lot of essays. However, students are most likely to look at the prices when watching adverts. This is why I feel like I didn't achieve this target audience. I feel like what I produced would be targeted to existing Macbook or Apple fans who are a bit older than your average student. I think this because my advert many showcased the Macbooks design, without giving any specifics about the Macbook. This requires the person watching who is actually interested in the product to dig deeper into it, and fans of the brand are more likely to do so. Thinking back, I think that I included more colour throughout the scenes, younger audiences would be more attracted to it. The only variety of colour in the advert was coming from the Macbook screen; the rest of the scene was almost pitch black. I also think the pacing affected the target audiences, because if something is fast paced, I feel like younger audiences are more likely to be drawn to it.

My primary research did not influence the outcome of my advert very much because I already had a plan, however if it did, it would have influenced how fast paced the advert was, and therefore changing the whole style of the advert. Looking back at the questions I asked in the survey in my primary research, I think that I could have asked better questions. The questions I asked were very broad and general. My experimental research helped with the render times of the project itself, however it did not effect how the advert looked in general. My secondary research impacted the song choice for the project, which further influenced me to do a slow paced advert in the first place.

The process of making the advert went very smoothly. I didn't come across many obstacles during the creative process, and if I did I solved them fairly quickly. A good example of this was the LED lights on the keyboard. I was having trouble making the LED'S animate from right to left. It took a while but with a lot of trial and error and moving different nodes around, I was able to get the effect that I wanted. I'm glad that this is happening because it shows I'm finally getting more knowledgeable within Blender as a software. Although, I would have improved how I managed my time during this project. I spent a lot of time planning and producing the advert and not enough time researching for the advert, which could have resulted in better overall choices for the advert (choices of style, song etc). There are also some other obstacles that I weren't able to get past, which led to me scrapping some ideas. For example, I originally planned to have the keyboard lift up for the 2nd scene, but I didn't model holes for the key caps to go in, and I didn't have enough time to cut each individual hole out. I could have used a boolean operation to make this process faster, which I did originally try, however the mesh topology turned out to be really messy and hard to work with. Even if I did get a good result I would have had to model internals. This would have just taken up too much time.

Overall, I think the end result turned out really good. The Macbook Pro scenes with the low amount of lighting really made the Macbook stand out and look realistic. I am also satisfied with the camera angles I produced. I was able to mess around with depth of field for the first time with this and it turned out to . I aimed to make it look as professional as possible; something that you could actually see on TV or on YouTube, and I feel like I have accomplished in that aspect. The song fit very well with the atmosphere, and the way the scenes cut to the beat made it very satisfying to watch. I didn't have many sound effects in the advert, but the ones I did add made the actions onscreen feel very impactful. If I was to improve on it, I think the intro and the ending could have been executed better. With the intro, it was kind of hard to make out what camera was flying through. The ending could have been executed way better than it was. The animation of the Macbook spinning in didn't looks as smooth as I wanted it and quality of the Macbook wasn't the best. This may have been because I rendered it in a faster render engine. The main Macbook scenes were rendered in Blenders path-racing engine, "Cycles". The last scene was rendered in Blenders realtime engine, "EEVEE". EEVEE takes shortcuts in a lot of areas (shadows, reflections etc) to render in real-time at pretty good quality. If you take the time to optimize all the settings and pick the right values for the scene, you could equal quality to cycles if you do it right, however I haven't had the chance to dive into EEVEE properly yet. This is probably why Macbook quality wasn't on par with the rest of the advert. If I had more time, I would definitely add more scenes going more in-depth into Macbook (talking about specifications etc) and why its the best choice for you to try and redirect to my original target audience.