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kleinbl00  ·  3080 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Anatomy of a Campaign Ad - Now You See It

So Hitchcock is actually talking about the Kuleshov Effect which is a fuckton more interesting than your linked video. It's a clever editing technique, as opposed to "the only word I understand is 'montage' therefore everything I see is a montage' as listed...

...okay, wait.

Sorry for dogging on your video.

My roommates are fond of these things. They drive me up the fucking wall. The "I have a minimal understanding of a subject and a bootleg copy of Premiere - let's see how many hits I can get on Youtube" school of educational video is one that, I believe, leads us straight to Idiocracy. It's journalism through sophistry, a triumph of style over substance that makes Entertainment Tonight look like mutherfucking Frontline. And this guy is an ass. You're not. You just found this in your facebook feed and think you learned something. But you didn't.

So look. No editor in their right mind would point to political ads and describe them as subtle. You don't need to be a genius to know that crunching the gamma and throwing in an NTSC filter is gonna make your shit look grainy, and grainy shit is bad.

And yes. Montages lend power and majesty and cause you to associate things without actually showing the thing. Show a muslim, show a bomb, muslims are bombers.

There is subtle shit in political ads: voiceovers that say bad things are almost always compressed more than voiceovers that say good things. People you dislike are generally in ECU while people you're supposed to like are shown full frame. But this choad doesn't even know that. He just wants you to know that montages make you think you watched a stabbing.

Look, idiot (not you, the author of the youtube video). What Hitchcock is saying is that devoid of context, the audience will assume that the face someone is making matches the images being shown, and that shown a completely null face, audiences will ascribe emotion to it if they feel emotion.

Hitchcock is not saying that showing Clinton walking around the White House makes you think Hillary Clinton walks around the White House.

Anatomy of a campaign ad:

Anatomy of a campaign ad:

Anatomy of a campaign ad:

Anatomy of a campaign ad: