I seriously, seriously recommend anyone watch this.
Further listening: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence/achilles-heel-advertising-repositioning-the-competition-1.3473631
indeed, basically anything from that show. "Under the Influence" taught me a lot about how people try to convince other people to do things for them.
so... I do a little video editing on the side.... and it always amazes me how people are MESMERIZED by the simplest things. Give me a folder full of family photos and your favorite song - boom! You've got this three minute montage that brings tears to their eyes. If you put a title on it, or ANY kind of special effects or transitions at all - and they think you're Steven Spielberg. The human eye/ear/mind relationship is a funny thing.
and like, you can create a familial closeness between people who are not actually close. just fade from one person to another a few times and they'll be like "oh those two are so close in all these pics!"
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:
maybe he's just so good at montages that he convinced me that montages are everywhere and everything. maybe we're getting to "I'm So Meta Even This Acronym" levels of meta! (sorry, i was mostly just looking for an excuse to use an old joke that came to mind as I typed out the previous line) I will give to you wholeheartedly that this person has a minimalist, let's say sophomoric view of his subject - for one, he calls it "brainwashing", which is just fucking weird, it's a suggestion implant at best. However, I think the message he's trying to get across (that you don't even know how hard they're working to play on your subconscious) is important to spread around. If you're looking for better, more educated and researched content, I do seriously suggest the radio show I linked (if you can get it, it's CBC). It's all about the mechanics of how advertising works on subconscious suggestion (with egregiously good and bad examples, flops and hits, etc)
My class studied advertising in 7th grade. I forget that most classes didn't. I have a rough time with radio shows and podcasts. The lack of editing drives me up the wall. Longform I can do; the "we have an hour to kill so we'll ramble for five minutes before getting our shit together" approach of almost all things hip and young makes me want to stab people in the eye.
For me it was "Critical Thinking" in 10th grade, but yeah... we were taught how to dissect every element in an ad, understand how it was tweaking us and controlling the way we feel, and then how to find the logical leaps and fallacious arguments. I remember cutting out ads, pasting them onto posterboards, and highlighting the colors, fonts, layout, image choice, etc. Juxtaposition was particularly valuable. Take the tag line from one ad, and stick it on another, and you immediately see the stupidity in both. And that was in the mid-1980's. Imagine what they could teach today with tools like iMovie and Tableau Public... Jibbers Crabst YES!!! No Mark Maron, I do not want to listen to you yammer on for 7 minutes about fucking nothing before you even get to the title or topic of today's show. You are not that good, interested, insightful, or have anything meaty to say. Your guests fill that role, so shut up and let them speak!! Podcasts today are like Geocities... all <blink> tags, tiled GIFs of stars, and crappy clipart. In 5 years people will listen to today's podcasts (if any remain on any old spinning disks that happen to still be attached to a network), and wonder how we put up with so little information stretched over such vast periods of time.... My class studied advertising in 7th grade. I forget that most classes didn't.
I have a rough time with radio shows and podcasts. The lack of editing drives me up the wall.
Well, I certainly won't force you, but I will say that it isn't a "hip and young" show and is relatively well produced. Maybe in comparison to Car Talk. this, for example is a half hour radio program about loyalty programs.I have a rough time with radio shows and podcasts. The lack of editing drives me up the wall. Longform I can do; the "we have an hour to kill so we'll ramble for five minutes before getting our shit together" approach of almost all things hip and young makes me want to stab people in the eye.