Advertising Week 2: Task 2

As our advertising project this week was about Mcvities biscuits we came up with idea's again for a poster. The difference this week was that our poster would be A3 size (instead of A4 as our cutlery poster was) and that we would have to have a pack shot of the product and do something creative with our product. 

Here are the ideas I came up with:

I wanted to split my poster into two A4 pages and have the pack shot on one page and the creative idea on the other page. But after looking at my idea's I realised I could use them for a pack shot as well as a creative idea. 

I decided to try out 3 different ideas in the studio, the 2nd idea (Always the best), the 3rd idea (Made for enjoyment) and my 5th idea (Number 1 choice) to see which I liked best of all. 

This was my lighting for my first shoot:

Halfway through taking my photographs I changed my white balance because it was too blue and dark on auto white balance so I put my camera on live view and went through all my white balance settings and found that shade setting was a bit better so I kept it on this setting for the rest of my photographs. 
For my first idea I experimenting with the layout of other biscuits. I started out with just four different biscuits around the Mcvities biscuit and then decided to add 4 more biscuits of the same type I already had. I was testing out placing the biscuits in different ways. I positioned them in couples so that when the hand goes to grab the Mcvities biscuit the hand doesn't cover up too many biscuits. First I tried this with my own hand but it was difficult so I  asked my friend if she would place her hand there for me. It was better with her hand there because I had more control of taking my photograph and when I was positioned above with my camera I could move in order to make sure the hand and fingers weren't covering the Mcvities biscuit writing. 
I then moved onto my other idea's and because they were more simple I didn't take as many photographs. 

When I went to editing my photographs in Photoshop I did the same steps for each photograph: Spot healing dirt from the still life table out, Levels for brightening my photograph and adding contrast and sharpening with the unsharp mask.

For this photograph using the mask I made the background white and then erased all the over brightness on the biscuits. 

Before:

After:

Shoot 2:
I decided to focus of my first idea of having the Mcvities biscuit elevated in the middle with other biscuits around.  As for my first shoot I only had a few biscuits around I decided I wanted more biscuits. 

Snoot:

For this shoot I decided to put white card underneath my biscuits because I was didn't want to cleaning the dirt marks from the table.   
I tried to organize my biscuits in different ways to see which layout looked better. I also took out the bourbons as they were quite dominant in the picture and the photograph didn't look as interesting or colourful. Out of all the layouts I liked IMGP0489 and IMGP0497  best out of them all. 

As I forgot to have a hand in my photograph I had to reshoot.
I had the lighting the same as my second shoot.

IMGP0499 was taken with only one light and then IMGP0500 was when both lights were switched on. I had originally tried to position my biscuits on the table without the white card but my biscuits kept sliding off so I decided to keep the white card. 

First we tried the lighting techniques of switching all the lights off and then switching them on one by one to see how the biscuit looked and what the shadows were like. 
I tried different hand positions until I found the last one was the best and I was pleased with my image. 


For my Indesign layout as I had centered my biscuit the middle of the page would have cut off the biscuit which is the main point but all the other biscuits made the focus confusing.
So in Photoshop I created a background copy and using the quick selection tool I went around the hand and biscuit creating a new layer. I then changed the opacity of the background to 80% so that it was still visible but not taking the focus away from the Mcvities. I then moved the background layer so that it was towards the right hand side of the page and the hand as well so that most of the sleeve was hidden as that too was distracting. 

I then put my image into Indesign and tried to match my slogan to the Mcvities writing. 
My slogan was originally 'Always the best' but then my friend suggested 'Keep it simple, Keep it Mcvities. Which made me think and combine both my idea and my friends and came up with 'Always the best, Always Mcvities' 
I decided to make the 'always Mcvities' bolder so it stand out.