As mentioned before in a past blogpost I decided to edit the John Lewis advert for my remix artefact. The main reasons for this are;
- Its topical
- It will hopefully spread quite far
- It should be relatively quick to make
The advert came out at 8am on Thursday 10th November (a departure from the normal Friday release date due to remembrance day) By 11am it had over 700,000 views, by 10pm it had over 6 million. Below is the advert they released.
Its a bit of a departure from recent years when our heart strings have been pulled via cute animals, lonely old men and sad snowmen, but it didn’t stop it trending it twitter, featuring on all the major news websites and it didn’t stop EVERYONE talking about it.
It did give me a dilemma, I had a pretty clear idea of what to do to a sad video, but one that was meant to be happy and funny? I am not as good at that. I looked at just replacing the music with the original – but that was boring, I looked at focusing on the dog – but again there wasn’t much scope there. So I went funny, and focused on the trampoline as you can see below.
I have used the same meta data as the original advert to hopefully gain some views, what I do notice this year is that people so far haven’t done many parodies but have focused on reaction videos, this might be a time thing and could change in the next few weeks.
I have kept the video length closer to two minutes like the original advert to help gain more views, I also kept the opening frames as close to the original as possible for the same reason. If Leonard Cohen had died on Thursday I would have swapped the music for his, unfortunately the timings didn’t match up and I had already made my remix.