Introducing the … hot dog, dog bed!
Our teacher introduced us to the idea of the Fair Go Ad
awards and hooked our interest letting us view some of last year’s entries. We
thought the children had some really good ideas. Our teacher wondered if we
would be interested and of course we were delighted to give it a go, as our
school motto is ‘Our best always’ – so we were going to give it our best try!
We had a lot of fun forming several small groups,
brainstorming ad ideas involving an animal. We had ideas ranging from a cat
eating a whole pizza to an animal teaching values. It was neat hearing our
peers’ ideas. We had a class vote for the most entertaining idea and the idea
that was a ‘hot’ favourite’, was a ‘dog bed with hot dog features’. Our teacher
loved the idea as she absolutely loves dogs.
Following this we had auditions for the speakers. Several
students in our class are really confident speakers, who are able to use
clarity of voice and expression. We narrowed it down to about 7 actors, with a
few substitutes as well. We thought it
would be cool to dress in mufti. All students from our class could contribute
to the props. A few artistic students offered to do some signs that could be
visual aids in the advertisement.
We timed our ad and realised we would need to edit some
sentences as we were quite a bit over time. On the first day of filming some of
us forgot our props, but it was good to practice our speaking parts. We had
about 10 takes! We worked on our props and decided to use fabric to create fillings
for our hot dog bed. It looked quite cool. We would have liked to have used a
real dog in our ad, but then we decided to include our fluffy toy class pet
called ‘Blackberry’. Blackberry had lots of adventures with different students
in our class throughout the year, including going on camp. So we thought it
would just be fair to let him help us with this important ad production.
Our teacher organised some permission slips to double check
with our parents that it would be all good for us to appear on television. It
also included our script to practice at home. Unfortunately three members of
our cast were absent on the day because of winter colds. Luckily we had our
back-up actors and they were thrilled to be given the opportunity to
participate.
The following day we had our outfits and props organised. We
had another practise in class and our teacher gave us some final suggestions.
We were fortunate to have the use of the staffroom for the morning and another
helpful staff member helped us with the final takes. One of our peers did the
filming for us. We returned to class to show our teacher some of our best
recordings. She downloaded a handful of clips and then our class mates got to
view it and collaboratively we chose the best example.
Everybody congratulated us and said ‘Tino pai’ on a great
effort. Our teacher downloaded our clip to her Youtube account and entered us
for the competition. We hope everybody will enjoy our ad. This was a wonderful
opportunity for us to shine. So here goes – “Calling all owners of doggies who
are feeling the winter cold. Check out our colourful hot dog bed!”
Room 15
