The 2nd Annual 4th Grade Film Festival (Part 5: Make Your Life Better)

There were several genres in advertising that this year's class identified, but when it came down to writing scripts, the following are what most students chose:

Metaphor
Famous People
Extreme Action
Humor
Make Your Life Better

The last genre I'll feature is "Make Your Life Better." In other words, use our product and you'll have a better life. Not many student commercials capture the joy of this genre better than the one below:

Those phones at the beginning of that commercial were origami phones that actually contracted and expanded. I thought they were awesome, but for some reason the author of this commercial never tried to sell them in his class business. Nor did he try to sell the giant paper airplane he made for this commercial. 

The thing I like about students writing in this genre is that it can be so varied. Unlike some of the other genres (Extreme Action tends to be about people who are lost and looking at a map) there ends up being a lot of variety:

This last one was technically challenging. We tried a paper on a green string, but that was too difficult to control. We finally settled on a student who wore a green jump suit, and then we taped the paper to her back and had her dance around. It's far from perfect but it's the imperfections that give this a nicer feel: