Aaaaand Action!

,One of my favorite movies is Captain Ron.  In one of the opening scenes the son knocks over a carton of milk and immediately picks it up and places it upright on the counter.  Just a few seconds later another scene shows the milk carton lying down on its side as if it had never been righted.

That’s the continuity person sleeping on the job.  You’ve seen this happen in sitcoms where the shot switches back and forth between two people in a conversation.  The collar or tie on one of the characters is in a different position each time you see them or in really bad cases they are wearing a different tie or shirt.  You might also say the person doing the editing made a faux pas by missing it.

There are a couple of editing doozies out there in TV commercialdom that deserve to have a raspberry blown at them.  The lady in the insurance ad is standing still when the commercial comes on and then starts to walk down the scenic path as she “shares” how a wonderful insurance program has been good to her.  No, no, no!  The whole idea of this type of ad is to show that an everyday person in an everyday situation is just like you as they go about the normal routine of life such as walking down a trail and not worrying about her insurance coverage.  In final editing, the clip should have been trimmed so the commercial starts with her already walking so we could get the feel that we just happened to catch her in her daily routine.  Instead, the ad tells us, “This lady is now going to walk so the ad can have some action in it.”  This cut caused the ad to fail in its objective to bring us into that woman’s personal viewpoint.

Similarly, the ad that shows the football star getting out of the barber chair at the end of a hair cut undermines the message it should be conveying.  We see the athlete getting his hair cut and  telling us about a product that has made his life even better than it was.  The ad was supposed to let us see that a famous person does everyday things just like you and me and therefore the product that helps him will help us.  Unfortunately the guy that edited this one let the clip go too long.  We see the football star finish his line and stop halfway out of the chair and look at the camera with a facial expression that says, “You mean like this?”  The effect is that after we watch this one, instead of thinking, “Oh, I want to try some of that product,” any image of the product itself is pushed out of our head by thoughts of how obviously staged the action was.

Of course, the director shares some of the blame here since he should have told the talent to get up from the chair and walk away instead of just telling him to “act like” he was getting up out of the chair.  These ads, like others we have discussed, didn’t do their jobs.  The money and time spent on them was wasted.  Who’s to blame?  In this case all of the above but I can tell you that if an ad I ordered for my company turned out like one of these, I would have it done over.  You may not have noticed these things before but you will now.  Did I ruin ad viewing for you?  OK, go ahead and yell at me or share an ad fail you may have noticed in commercials and as always…..like, share and subscribe.  TTFN

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