My Live-Action Commercial

[Captain Amadeus (Legendary Em)]

Alright, this time I'm just making a fool out of myself. Last year, I was in a Mass Media class in my senior year of highschool. One of our big projects was to make a commercial for an original product. Since I was the only one in my group with a creative bone in his body, I was put in charge of pretty much the whole shibang.

My product? Kill Kola, a beverage that increases one's testosterone and blood-lust 100%. My commercial? It involved a man dressed as a beaver.

Here's the link; watch it now, and then read the rest of this post: s444.photobucket.com/albums/qq170/VictoriasMassMedia/?action=view¤t=1617ec54.pbr

The 'actors' are my friend Juan Marante in the Beaver Mask, and myself as the guy who is randomly punched in the face for throwing a can at the beaver. But you really wouldn't understand that because of the shoddy camera work and editing that took place.

See, there were too other women in my group. One just crushed the can with her foot and said 'See ya!' for the rest of the day. The other took the video home, did an pretty bad job on selling the product in the second-to-final scene (mostly because you couldn't hear what she was saying), and decided to edit it all together herself. Never mind the fact that certain scenes needed to be re-shot all-together; the beaver did not come even CLOSE to touching me and that's why she felt the need to put the word 'crazy' by my face so that it couldn't be seen.

She put the scenes together in photobucket's 'remixer' which just plain didn't get any sense of timing correct with the scene switches. Things were even worse originally, but right before it was presented (!) I was shown the 'finished' product and had five minutes to put the scenes in an order than made sense.

So what you have just seen is the destruction of my creative proccess. Parts to look out for are me getting beat-down by a man in a bad beaver costune, and said beaver standing with his foot on my back during the scene when the can is crushed (I am laying sprawled in the background).

I worked my butt off and the project got a C-, while some guy who'd done nothing but move Jpegs around a screen in Windows Movie Maker while DJ music played got an A+. There is no justice in the world...

[Lofar]

I know how you feel, man. One year, I did a 5-minute-long CG animation for Biology demonstrating three different topics. I also did all the sound recording and video editing. There was one night when I only got an hour of sleep, and that was while it was rendering. I ended up getting a C on it because of a few small issues with the explanations.

[UNIT 0918]

I know how you feel too. I know how frustrating it is to have a junk group with you doing all of the work. I'm also going to major in film, so I can understand what went wrong too.

Many people are only in it for the grade, and won't do any work if there are others in the group that'll do it. Hopefully you get into a group with others willing to do the assignment well to next time.

[Dashe]

That sounds exactly like what happened on my last psychology group project. I was basically on my own charged with making the presentation at least bearable, as making it interesting probably would have killed me. The professor actually figured out what happened and I scraped by with a B for the assignment instead of a C, but since everyone else in the group was so intent on just sloughing out the bare minimum it was like I just got ripped off when it came down to what that project could have been.

In short, you have my utmost sympathies.

[Lofar]

Oh, yeah...I forgot to mention in mine that I had a partner, since that's kinda the point of this thread. Lol. I did most of the work - the other guy drew up some storyboards, but it was mainly stuff I thought of. We both received the same grade, though, so it's a slightly different situation. My grade on it was partly because I bit off more than I could chew.

Sounds like a lot of people on here get stuck with the lazy groups. It actually doesn't happen to me very often anymore. In fact, there have been several times when the rest of the group has moved a little too fast for me, making me look like a slacker. Hahah. All of the Chemistry labs I did this year are the best example. I was always with the same two guys, and they would often get things done really quickly and efficiently. Of course, faster isn't always better, but they would put in enough effort. I'm usually quite a perfectionist, and I try to make sure everything is as good as it can possibly be when I'm in a group, so I was always correcting mistakes and fixing things up in the lab reports and what not.

[Deleted]

Don't let that bother you, legendaryEmerald. Most of the time, the best output of a project isn't the grade, but the experience and the lessons that you learn. Don't think of it as presenting something for your instructor, but rather accomplishing something that you wish to do.
While it's good to follow correct standards set by instructors, I think if you have high standards yourself, then you should be happy that you have accomplished what you think is up to good standards, regardless of whether or not it got recognized.

Last semester, I have been working on my database project for months, working from the morning to 10 PM everyday, until the first demonstration day... In which the server was glitchy and I failed to present a good project to my professor. All that hard work vanishing because of an error in the university's server, I was so so disappointed, until I heard stories of my friends' failures, haha. I did get the highest grade after the final demonstration, but nothing, absolutely nothing was more satisfying than seeing your work up to your ambitious standards.

So keep upping the ante and never allow disappointment or incompetence to sneak inside your heart!