Fair Go Ad Entry 'The Hot Dog'

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