Today, teachers orchestrate computer-based tasks in software applications in Swedish primary schools. Meaning is made through various modes, and multimodal perspectives on literacy have the basic assumption that meaning is made through many representational and communicational resources. The case study presented in this paper has analysed pupils’ products in which they made multimodal meanings in a film-editing software application. The task was to make advertising films for planets in the solar system. The analysis of the advertising films has been conducted using the visual grammar framework involving three metafunctions: the representational, interactive and compositional. The findings show how the digital features made it possible to compose film clips with a variety of modes of expression but also the impact of social and cultural influences on the pupils’ products. The representations were made in order to communicate and the representation of ideas was inspired by the advertising genre of Western society. From a pedagogical view, the impact of the instructions and the teacher’s design on pupils’ meaning-making needs to be taken into account and further discussed. © 2017 The Author(s)