Advertising Project: Research

Link to project.
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1OZuuVDvsUcgO4Dw7e3KW7MzMGapusxr0

We started the new term off with a week long project looking at advertising. This project asked us to carefully consider the meaning of the images and language we use in our work, in this context to persuade our audience to buy into an idea we are selling.

We had a near pod lecture that asked us to consider in greater detail and we learnt the following terms.
Sign-An image that has a universally recognised meaning
Symbol-An image that has a meaning added it to it within the context of a film or advertisement
Latent- The underlying meaning that is implied that appeals to your subconscious
Manifest-The surface level meaning that is implied.

During the near pod we watched a series of advertisements and tried to identify these features.
We were then set our tasks. We got into groups consisting of 2 filmmakers, an animator and a photographer. Our task was to create a 1 minute advertisement video, 15 second animation and produce 3 photographs, as an advertising campaign to sell the concept of 'no thing'. We weren't supposed to relate the concept to a brand. The longest conversation that our group had at the start was about how to find something positive about the words 'no thing' that we would able to promote or sell. To help us we decided to discuss things that we use and what is bad about them as a way of finding the opposite. We listed things such as laptops,phones,gaming consoles and quickly came to the idea of having no things is better than distractions.We knew we wanted to produce an uplifting advert aimed at teenagers.

So we watched sports adverts and technology adverts specifically Nike and Apple's Think Different as they are often designed to motivate people. A common theme we noticed with the adverts was the use of text instead of dialogue. The concept we decided on was to place videos of materialistic objects next to videos of real life experiences and place the text 'You Don't need that' 'You want this'. Implying that real life experiences enrich your life and therefore are worth purchasing unlike materialistic 'things'. As a result the tag line we decided on was 'No Thing is everything'.

 The first problem we initially ran into was the videos of the 'life experiences'. We struggled to make them look authentic. we tried to make the 'product' shots look as artificial as possible so that they looked less desirable in comparison to the 'experience' shots but the experience videos looked too staged to show enough of a contrast. We then decided to use real phone videos from real experiences. This way the portrait video provides a contrast to the landscape shots of the 'product' shots. We then decided to instead to use stills from the 'product' videos instead of  the actual videos so they they looked more static and lifeless in comparison, thus making the idea of 'no thing' look more appealing.

We animated the text using photoshop and decided to use white text on a black background as it was consistent with the black bars next to the phone videos.

Our main worry going in to the crit was that people might not understand the concept;however the most common feedback we received was that the use of opposites made the concept clear, which was encouraging as our reason for using contractions had fulfilled it's purpose.