Andy and I worked together and put a lot of time and thought into creating our advertisement. As soon as we found out we were making an advertisement, we both knew we wanted to do a short film with a strong story behind it. We decided that we would use the tip of “Helping Others in our advertisement to promote mental wellbeing. We felt that this could be a topic that we could do heaps with, and after a good week or two, we finally came to a conclusion on the storyline. Our message was that helping people can be beneficial to mental fitness in the many ways it assists yourself and others. We wanted to inspire and inform teenagers and young people that helping others, in what seems to be simple tasks, could serve a greater purpose in the near future. We decided to focus on a specific case of depression stemming from bullying and the ways in which helping others could ultimately bring your spirits up and help you push through tough times. From there, we created a plot outline that we knew we would have to alter as we went through the pre to post production periods.

After writing our pitch, we filled out a basic outline of the sequence of our film. We decided on having multiple scenes of different occasions in which the main character, the boy, would be helping people. Along with that we had to think of different ways to implement the message through the story. We decided, after multiple options, showing the boy being bullied (as the introductory scene), a series of helping scenes, another bullying scene, and then the climax where the boy seems to be upset, but everyone he has helped came together to support him. We felt that doing this showed the practical side to the message of the way that helping people could also help yourself.

Organising the filming day was difficult, but when we got into it, it was pretty straight forward. The advertisement only uses males as we could not find any females that were either interested, willing or able to help us film. However we still intended the ad to target all genders. After actually beginning to film, we finished all the scenes quicker than we expected; all up just over two hours. The bullying scenes needed to be filmed at school so we decided to wait until we had the opportunity to film them either in class or during lunchtime. After filming them we were left with editing.

The editing process was quite fun for Andy and I. We used movie maker as the editing software as we didn’t need anything complex; an edit of the footage with text and some music over the top. Choosing the correct music was critical as it had to lighten the mood of the ad but also fit the pace of the shots. We chose a song that highlighted the happy undertone of the film and the benefits that helping people has on your mental fitness.

We hope our advertisement will help teenagers understand that with such a small kind act of simply helping someone else, they can fill the world with hope and themselves with hope.