When I watched the video on persuaders, I had this thought
that stuck with me the most, are we the REAL persuaders? Not the people that
sell us our vehicles, clothing, food, and so on. I mean the average person that
buy products on a daily basis.
The more I watch the video, the more this question came back
to my thoughts. We get bombarded with advertisement everyday, while at work,
school, social life, or whatever you’re doing in a daily basis. The real
question comes in and it is, do we persuade ourselves into buying products we
own? How many times have we gone out shopping for a new pair of shoes and say,
“well, I don’t need it but I want it.” The end process of that is to buy the
pair of shoes and wear it maybe fives times in a month. This is just an example
but think to your own lives and think of something you bought, that you really
didn’t need. I feel that our society is more materialized then it needs to be.
We want the best car, house, pet, job, and whatever else there is. We persuade
ourselves into those things, even though we don’t need all the things we buy.
Advertisements have influence in our lives since there is so
much of it. Though there is one person who does the majority of the persuading,
and that is our self….
If I were doing the shoot, I would use the idea we have now
but tweak it. The advertisement would consist of two people talking about the
writing center. Both of them would be college age kids, one playing the role
that has been to the writing center and other one that is new to this school.
The camera shots I would use would be the upper portion of
the body, meaning the arms, chest, and head will be seen. The easiest way to do
it is for the talent to memorize the lines, if not we can take two different
shots for each person. Both cameras would be used; each one would be focused on
one person. The scene would look like one person would be talking to the right
and then the other person would be facing the left. I want to show the body emotion
for each person to get the fullness of how the writing center feels for him or
her. The ideal finish project would be a conversation between the two people
back and forth. Other things I would want to include is live footage of the
writing center, where it is and tutors at work with students. I feel if people
see students working with their tutors, they will feel a connection. The
biggest thing is to show that the writing center is a great place to be and a
fun environment to learn.
This is my basic idea for the writing shoot and maybe we can
adapt it to the one we will do. Let’s see what happens…
While experiencing the studio life for the first time is a
great experience. We had the opportunity to try different roles such as:
director, camera, audio, talent and the list continues. The one role that I
personally enjoyed the most was working with the camera.
While working as the cameraman, my role was to create shots
for the director to choose and use for the program. Some of the things I had to
do before the show started was to do white balance on the camera and focal
length as well. With white balance, we have to set the camera to let it know
what the color white is in the room. After the lights are set up, we would use
a white sheet of paper for the camera to zoom in on and go to our menu screen
on the camera to find the white balance function. Set the white balance and
then move onto the focal length, which we pick an individual and zoom in all
the way. Then adjust the focus with the knob near the front of the camera till
the picture is clear.
While we were shooting the show, the director will tell us
what shot they would like to see. Some examples would be shots of two people, a
three shot of everybody and a one shot of the host. I really enjoyed the
ability to create shots and watch everything progress well and then watch in
postproduction the finished project. That to me is an awesome feeling of
accomplishment. I notice some things I can learn from too, one is the position
of the camera. I felt the camera was too close to the talent and kept me
restricted from all the shots I was capable of doing. Now I know for next time
to bring back the camera to make the shots look better. Another thing I can do
better is practice some shots before we start recording, so I can get a sense
of what shots I can provide for the director. These are a few things I can work
on next we do some recording.
The more I’m in the studio; I enjoy it more every time I’m
in there. Other roles were also good experiences but I enjoyed the camera role
the most. I don’t know what’s about it, but I love the freedom to create shots
and produce great material.
One of my favorite commercials from this past Super Bowl has
to be the Doritos ad of the cat-killing dog. It used different styles to catch
your attention. The ad used humor, animals, and music.
A man is seen working outside in his yard and notices a dog
burying something. He notices a tag that belonged to his cat, but the dog is
right there to bribe him with the note saying, “you didn’t see nuthin.” I found
it funny that the guy goes along with it, even when the wife asks if he’s seen
the cat he still denies it. The music for me sets the mood of something devious
that is happening. The cover up of the cat’s body by the dog and the guy denying
what he saw. I felt the ad is memorable
and kept the Doritos product visible in most of the commercial.
This commercial I will remember for a while, will I buy
Doritos though. Probably not, but they still get their name out to the public.
When reading a short article about The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman, I felt
there was some similarity towards the Codes on Gender video we watched. One
piece that stood out was the roles for characters vs people in the everyday
life.
One example is the military man; he is supposed to be the
strong and show no weakness towards others. Then in another case a veteran can
be diagnosed with chronic disease and shows emotions and a sense of
hopelessness. The first example is something we expect that the young man is strong and independent but the veteran is a different manner with more emotions. What if we switched the situation and made the young man weak and veteran strong. Would we put them in different groups and be harsh on them saying they are not living the role they should be. In the theaters, the actors portray what everyday life is, our
roles for different people either male or female or age. I get a sense that
sometimes we can relate to actors or actresses, thinking that could be us in
that situation. I wonder if we try to push these roles on society too much or
we just accept them.
This article does show resemblance to the Codes of Gender,
but I feel that the times are changing. The old phrase of “sex sells” is still working, but I feel that
we trying to move away slowly from it. Even this past weekend in the Super
Bowl, I watched the commercials and a majority of them had more humor. There
were a few sex appeals commercials but not many. I feel that a change is coming
and coming soon….
Watching Hamilton Hamish working on multi-camera events and actually working on a show are different. Watching Hamish you can see the passion he has for his work and enjoys doing it. In reality, you never know what something feels like until you experience it. When we started to produce shows in the studio, I enjoyed the environment I was in. Everybody wanted to be part of it, even though we are still in the testing stages of the show. Every time we have more practice it becomes a little more easy, though I still want to do more in the studio, so hopefully I can. Hamish made it look easy but I feel it can be the same with us, once we have more practice with the studio. I hope we can produce some great shows and I can learn as much as possible while we are working on our shows. Now all there is left to do is start working hard, let's go.
We see ads every day in our lives, either through TV, billboards, magazines, clothes, and the list goes on. In the past, there has been a major separation between women in ads and men being in them. Is this an effect from our society and how we treat the other sex? Maybe we are so used to it, that we try to avoid it all together. Do the ads we see every day have an effect on us and how we live? To a degree we can say yes.
Most of the ads we see are with the ideal people we want to be. The women are young, fit, great eyes, beautiful glowing hair, and etc. The men are young, very well fit, six pack abs with every guy, and etc. As we see, these people are the standards for what our society is. When I watched two videos on advertising with Sut Jhaly on The Codes on Gender and Jean Kilbourne on Killing Us Softly 4, I found myself more informed about how advertising is really portrayed.
The first thing that has to be noticed is that sex and gender are two different things. Sex deals with biological differences, while gender deals with cultural and physical differences. As Erving Goffman's explains in his book about gender, that there are really two different sides, masculinity and femininity. With these two sides of masculinity and femininity, these two determines who is male and female in the cultural aspect. It is expected that we know our roles as men and women, this is known as gender display. The men are strong, confident, not shy, attackers, while the women are emotional, sensitive, sexual (innocent though) and fragile. These few examples determines who is masculine and feminine in the culture.
With Jean Kilbourne's video, I felt that it wasn't about how we are portrayed in the ads, but how we look. The women in the examples she showed were very skinny, and for me some were too skinny like to the bone almost. I understand if women and men want to stay in shape, but I feel there is a limitation to that. When you are under the weight your body should be, then there is a problem. I feel that sometimes we as a society judge ourselves to harshly. "If you're not skinny, then you're not beautiful." I find this a load of garbage in my opinion. Everybody will have their own unique features on their bodies, that makes us different. For me, I could care less what ads want me to be. I'm not going to be like, "oh look this guy has a beautiful girl in his arms, I need to look like him." No, I don't. One reason is that in the video Killing Us Softly 4, Kilbourne showed that ads are usually photo shop to get the ideal person. When I saw that, now I really don't care about the ads, because they're fake. Ads will still have an effect on people, sometimes good or bad.
The ad of the woman who is dirty and the sign wash me on her stomach is an example of what our society is. This is an ad for Axe body wash. I see examples from both videos, that supports their concepts. With Kilbourne, she states that many times the ads will show parts of a woman's body. Here we can see the head is not in the ad, just the body. Jhaly states that many times the woman is not in a vertical position, always twisted. Here we see the woman is bending her body at the hip, the knee is bent, the arms are twisted as well. In this ad, even though we can't see her face we probably can still say that she is young, fit, and beautiful most likely.
I chose another ad because I thought it was a little different, but still similar though. This ad shows a woman's body but we do see a part of her face. The ad is for Ralph Lauren polo t-shirts. The woman has a little more power with her hands in the pockets. This is different, we usually see this with men in ads. Her body is twisted like the previous ad is, so that's why I said it was similar. Again even though we can't see her face fully, we can assume that she is young, fit and etc.
The ads we see now are slowly breaking away from the norm, but not by much. Ads are going to be an influential force in our lives, until we do something to change it then it will only continue its same course. When we look at ads do we see people who we want to be, or do we realize that they don't really look like that in real life? Just in the ads.....
