2020 has been a year like no other, so this year the festive adverts and media have had to reflect the struggles and sacrifices families have made. Over the past weeks, We are all, like it or not, currently being exposed to a plethora of Christmas media campaigns. you will have already been exposed to a deluge of expensive media campaigns – which has one has most resonated with you, I wonder?
Every year, to write this blog post I review all of the Christmas media available to me and look for the best stimulus for learning and this year I found a few notable campaigns! So, how do an advert for a supermarket, a department store and a pizza company and our award-winning LGfL curriculum content link together? Read on to find out!
First off it had to be the Sainsburys campaign a collection of nostalgic adverts aims to take a heartfelt look at food, family and memories, transporting viewers through time by centring around the personal stories of modern British families and their connection to Christmas food. In each advert, the stories are brought to life through a combination of home video-style footage and phone conversations between family members in the present day.
The first of three mini-films, Gravy Song, tells how a father and daughter's excitement for Christmas gets them talking about his gravy and his 'famous' gravy song. The song brings back memories of years gone by, as the daughter tries to cope with the embarrassment of her dad's singing, whilst admitting her love for the gravy (and the song). The second film, Perfect Portions, shows a mother and son sharing happy memories of Christmases past, reminiscing about the way their dad used to carve the turkey years ago. The third and final film, Big Sarnie, shows two cousins catching up and remembering Boxing Days of the past at their nan's.
Throughout, the tagline, 'Food is Home. Home is Christmas' is an ode to the power that Christmas food has to transport us back to happy memories and for many of us, this resonates as after a difficult year we need to focus on better times. Why not ask your students to create a home-style video sharing their favourite memories of Christmas (it could be food, or a decoration, or a family tradition) using images, video and sound effects.
To do this you could use the free resource Adobe Spark, Spark comes fully loaded with several customization options — ensuring your video is as unique as it is engaging. Make changes to music, images, text and the layout of your video with a click of your mouse. This powerful online video maker allows you to make as many changes as you like, so you can truly make your imagination come to life. Make a video with Adobe Spark, and you’ll never have to worry about it looking like all the rest.
Using Adobe Spark as a free video maker simply couldn’t be easier. After selecting the “Video” option from the main menu, you’ll be taken to a title screen — where you can give your video project a title. Enter some text, or skip this stage and head straight to the design interface. Don’t worry if you want to change the title later, as you can make unlimited changes to the text. You then get the opportunity to choose a video template or start the design process from scratch.
If you are looking for audio tracks to add to your video, then we can help you with Audio Network, Teachers and learners have access to an extensive database of professionally recorded music by a wide range of professional composers and performers. the Audio Network database includes: A very wide selection of music professionally recorded music which is searchable by genre, style, instrument, artist, tempo and mood, The LGfL licence with Audio Network allows teachers and students to download any of the music files free of charge with the condition that the downloaded files must not be used for any commercial purposes.
Or if you are looking for a sound effect to add to your Christmas film we have BBC Sound Effects, over a 16,000 BBC Sound Effects which you can use in multimedia projects and presentations. This large database of audio sound effects can be used within a wide range of applications in an educational context. Many sounds have multiple versions to suit different uses and help enhance videos, presentations and podcasts.
You can’t do a Christmas media post without mentioning John Lewis, Their newly-released 2020 advert, Give A Little Love, illustrates how acts of kindness, large and small, can multiply and positively impact the world.
The festive charity campaign is inspired by the kindness of the British public during the pandemic, and together, John Lewis and Waitrose aim to raise £4 million for two charities: FareShare, which helps those facing food poverty, and Home-Start, which works with parents who need support, you may have noticed that this year at LGfL we also wanted to show our love by adding a heart to our logo to showcase how much we love education and to highlight that education is at the heart of our organization.
At the heart of LGfL is the belief that we are here to support schools, here are just a few things we have done this year to support education:
❤️ Did you know that LGfL has incubated one of the largest implementations of Cloud Ready Neverware in the world? Installing CloudReady breathes new life into old hardware, enabling schools to get extra use out of devices that may otherwise sit collecting dust.
❤️ Neverware's CloudReady operating system is built to run on almost any computer from the last 10 years, turning them into fast, secure devices using the same technology foundation as Chrome OS. Each LGfL secondary school can claim 120 CloudReady licences (saving £1200), and each LGfL primary school or special school can claim 30 CloudReady licences (saving £300) as part of their existing LGfL subscription find out more here.
❤️ Pledge 2020 is about supercharging connectivity across LGfL schools so they can make use of cloud computing, 4K streaming, virtual reality and cloud. The average boost to LGfL schools has been 200% which will place schools at the forefront of digital connectivity in the UK and the world, We have now more than doubled the bandwidth available to schools as part of a project Pledge2020 for free!
❤️ We have also supported schools in purchasing devices to support remote learning with our project Bridge The Divide, we have already taken orders for 10,000 of devices, Chromebooks and Winbooks and we are proud to announce we are now taking advance orders for our next wave of devices and now include ThinkPads, Join hundreds of schools who have already helped us to save over £6M to date here.
❤️ We have also provided free filtering for children at home during COVID19 via our Home Protect project with Tens of thousands of children now shielded at home. Join one of the fastest-growing communities and find out more here.
❤️ One of the saddest consequences of this year has been the surge in Free School Meal applications as we have seen an 80% increase over 12 months. Thousands of new families are struggling with the economic fallout and with our Free school meals checker available to all schools for free, we have helped schools identify over £50 Million of extra funding since 2015, for more information see here.
Why not ask your students to create a heart-themed animation using the fantastic digital tools you have access to via the just 2easy Toolsuite, jit (a tool for your youngest learners) has a simple but powerful animation tool to help students, see below for two simple examples of the kind of animation they could make.
My last piece of Chrismas media to inspire is the Papa Johns advert, In an effort to raise awareness and to support two of the most prevalent issues the UK is currently facing, hunger and homelessness, Papa John’s is launching its ‘Giving more this Christmas’ campaign, which sees the pizza delivery chain donating a chunk of their creative and marketing budgets to Crisis and the Trussell Trust.
To put the money which would have otherwise been spent on creative designs and production costs to better use, Papa John’s instead, enlisted help from internal staff to design and create the assets for its Christmas 2020 campaign using a camera and some cardboard.
I love the simplicity of the advert and is such a simple way to create a video with a powerful message, why not start eating a load of pizzas (or recycle packaging) and get creative with some cardboard and j2e5 to create a simple presentation showcasing a local charity?
Are you going to use this blog to inspire you to create your own Christmas media? If so, let us know by tagging our Twitter or Facebook account into a post and don’t forget for further Chrismas inspirations and ideas we also have the Christmas Cracker post for more festive fun.