Ad Campaigns & Semiotics

In class, we created political campaigns for and against gun control and for or against a candidate. Let's look at signs. A sign is made up of a signifier, which points to a signified. A signifier is some kind of thing (generally a tangible object, color, or something that a 10 year old could describe). What is signified is a little more difficult to get to. What is signified has cultural connotations, and you must keep context in mind. A signifier can point to many different things, and it is very subjective, but the goal is to be as objective and relevant to your context as possible. Now, we can take a look at some of these ads created in class, and we can distinguish what is a signifier and what it points to.



Danielle's Ad Campaign:

Signifier: Red curtains at the beginning of the movie..
Signified: There will be some sort of show or entertainment.

Signifier: The Statue of Liberty..
Signified: This generally represents freedom and America. (It is also indicative of something good.)

Signifier: Capitol of United States..
Signified: This, again, represents the United States. It can blur the line between what the candidate is saying and American standards.



Holly's Ad Campaign

Signifier: A girl in a white dress with her hair done and makeup on..
Signified: She is a bride in a wedding.

Signifier: A girl in a dress holding a gun..
Signified: Guns are harmless.

Signifier: A man sitting under a dead animal with a gun propped over the animal (the man is smiling).
Signified: He just hunted the animal, and he is proud.



Josh's Campaign Ad

Signifier: Balloons and campaign advertizements..
Signified: A celebration is taking place. (The person in the photo may have done something successfully.)

Signifier: Black and white image of news microphones held up to someone's face..
Signified: The person is being questioned about something. (Probably something that isn't so good..)

Signifier: Penny - (There is red text that says flat out that Mitt Romney is two faced, so we can't quite ignore that...)
Signified: The penny and the words two faced over the penny are pointing to two things:
When people are two faced, they say one thing to one person and say another thing (with their other face) to another person. The reference to the penny is really a reference to a coin. Some people would trick others by using a two faced coin (with the head of a president on each side) to flip, when making a deal or bet on the flip of a coin. That way, if the person always called heads, the person would always win. It has ONLY negative connotations; it is not good to be two faced.

Type in Motion 8

My man Conan O'Brien...

A unique thing about this video is that none of the text is being independently animated. It is all set where it is going to be, and the only thing being animated is the camera. The camera work and animation is actually good, and this is a major beef that I have with most kinetic typography (most kinetic type that I've found isn't actually that good - I thought it would be easy to find a lot for this blog, but it's hard to find well done projects).

I like the fact that this is in a 3d program. The light and diffused shadows make the text really give the illusion of three dimensions. Also, doing this in a 3d program allows the viewer to see different angles of the sides (extruded parts) of the text, which helps with the illusion of three dimensions in a two dimensional medium.

The designer uses boxes for separation, and within each box is a new phrase. I love that each phrase is extremely unique, and looks well kerned and tracked. Every section looks well thought out, and most sections seem like they could be a logo. (Some of them are.) The point is that this person didn't just stick to text, and that is what makes good kinetic type. Being creative with letterforms, geometric shapes, and everything else that goes into logo and type design adds so much. You can tell that the person who designed this put a lot more effort than just animating text onto a screen and timing it with the audio.

Type in Motion 7

MOSHUN


TYPOGAMI


This is the first time that I have seen anything like this. These two videos are fonts designed for After Effects.

Regardless of motion, I think that motion is a very creative typeface. It's not an average "safe" font. They got really creative with geometry, and wasn't afraid to have a LOT of variation between letterforms. For instance, the letters H, U, I, C, O, and S don't have any solid black, but V is almost entirely solid black, and K and A have tons of black in the letterform. I guess the way to tell if it's effective or not is if it looks unified, it does, and if it is legible, it is.

I don't like Typogami as much as Moshun, but it's still a very cool animated font. I like that all of the opening animations are the same rectangle, and then fold into their letterform. The beginning shows this green color that makes it look very pixelated and nasty, but the zoomed in version at the end shows it in different colors and with customizeable shadows, light position, and fold angle! Wow, I (now that I've seen the ending) like this just as much as Moshun.

I really like the idea of motion in letterforms. It would be cool to see something like this get standardized, as normal fonts have. I think that any project merging mediums is a worthy endeavor.

WDITGS - CMS

Doing some digging into other CMS solutions. It's taking so much time to write content that I no longer want to do anything twice. I want to do this the right way the first time. From what I hear, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and Plone are the options to go with. I like the flexibility of Joomla and Drupal, but WordPress seems so easy to use without a very steep learning curve.. I really want this to be about the content, and its organization. The only thing that I'm worried about is my ability to customize static pages with static content with WordPress. I want that, and the ability to really customize everything (Which I have less control over in WordPress, if I understand the differences correctly..). Hmmm...

Type in Motion 6

This is one of the sickest [most disgusting] animations. The thing is, it's just so fresh. I'd like to focus on the beginning and the end.

Starting with the text..

Tight kerning mixed with a good use of Bevel and Emboss creates the nice and simple black gray and white tone. When "tginho" first animates in, it doesn't just flip in place. It actually moves toward the camera at the beginning and eases into it's final position. Normally, people start out doing this, having the text totally flat (invisible). This animator actually had it tilted upside down a little bit, to start out with. This, in combination with animating towards the camera in 3d space, creates a great overall effect.

"Viuze" then animates in, and I love the animation used. Each letter has an anchor point at the bottom center of the letter-form. When it animates in, each letter individually scales up and then eases back down to its final size. Normally, the word as a whole would scale up and back down. The animator (maybe) took the time to create individual objects out of each letter, and animated them individually, independent of each other. The overlap of the letters looks great when they scale up, because the kerning stays the same. It's a very interesting and awesome way to work with text. [Side note: the animator then flips each letter-form independently.. so sexy.]

the Sound..

The sound is great. One thing that I notice about the animation style that I like is that it's a little late. The movement of the visuals seems really relaxed (to match the sound). Had they matched the animation perfectly to the sound, it wouldn't have the chill vibe.

Shapes and Color..

I love the accent colors used in this video. The gradient from orange to pink is awesome. The shapes move around and create positive and negative space, while adding the little accent of animation to music and color. The end (00:51 to the end) is probably my favorite part. The last three beats (with the little line that looks like a cursor) are so well done. The line goes from underlining one word to being the transitional visual to the next word. It then looks like it's interacting with the text to the right of it to the beat, and then creates the middle bar by expanding. This allows the animator to use the background grey as the text for his name. So so well done..

WDIGTS - A Little Stressed..

I haven't gotten any real feedback yet. I don't want to hound people that I am asking for free advise, so I may just start moving forward. I'm a little stressed about the fact that I haven't started on content, yet. I think that the best way to resolve this issue would be to ask a few more people for their opinions, and just start working. I feel confident enough in what I know about each of these areas that I know that what I have already WILL be in the final product. It MAY be organized differently, but I would rather be shifting things around at the last minute than writing massive amounts of content at the end. So, it is working out of order, and I may have to work backwards, in the end. But, I need to get cracking on this content. This week and weekend, I'm going to push to see if I can really get through some topics, and see how far I can get.

I just met with a teacher that I used to know in high school, and she told me that she started up a side business in the realm of photography. She isn't very experienced with editing software and had a lot of interest in the site. Just by talking with her, I gained some new insight on my target audience. BOOM!

Mountain Media Ministries - Remnant Church

Remnant Church hosted a two day event with Mountain Media Ministries to discuss how to become independent in an "unstable world." Between the inevitable fall of the dollar, oil, the situation with other major world economies, and our extreme amounts of debt, it is a very important time to be in a situation that allows you to have basic necessities, like food, water, energy, and warmth. In preparation for massive inflation, they discussed how to create a living situation that would make these basic necessities available in times of need.

They discussed gardening as well as how many acres one would need to grow trees for warmth in the winter. They also discussed how to prepare for food in the winter. They had a jarring demonstration, and went over some warmth and survival tips for winter months. Basically, we are such a soft generation that we would most likely die if we didn't have power. Even if we have well water, we still need electricity to pump it out, unless we have a manual pump installed. This event was all about advice for getting to a place that would get us off the grid, and help us be independent, and less reliant on big companies and the government. It is an important thing to be discussing, because - whether people want to believe it or not - our country is going to have some dramatic changes in the near future, and people need to be prepared.



[Top] Ad and Description. [Bottom] Notes and program.

WDIGTS Target Audience Research

I've been working on researching my target audience and getting some vital information. I wasn't thinking about some demographics that may have been missed, had I not talked, personally, with these people. I need to pay attention to non-mainstream programs, and somehow integrate them into my system. My goal isn't to cover EVERYTHING, but I would like to touch on everything that I can manage, to give people the widest perspective during their education.

My first inclination was to give the industry standard options, and then the freeware options. I think that it is the best way to go, in most cases, unless there is a notable similar program that provides either a major price cut or features that don't exist in the industry standard software. An example of this is realizing that a good portion of my audience use things like PaintShop Pro and Aperture.

My thoughts on which progrgrams to use are more like this: if I can't use an industry standard that gives me the best results, I will find a free version of the software until I can afford the better software or until I find the need to upgrade. I'd rather not spend money and then re-spend on something half better. I'd rather get what I can out of a free program until I can manage the best. [Many times, people will never need functions past the functions offered by free alternatives.] But, recognizing that everybody doesn't share this perspective is important, and I will make my best effort to cover other options that I find people using, as well.

Rosser Reeves' Political Commercials & The Persuaders

It's funny that war, taxes, skyrocketing prices, and the theme of "change" was used in Eisenhower's ad campaign, just as it is today. The creators of the campaign ads rely less on full pathos, and more on flawed logic. The political commercials seem to use a lot of fallacies of logic in their ads. They use forms of bandwagoning and irrelevant facts to sway people's decision making.

Song Airlines relied purely on pathos, giving no ethical or logical arguments in their main advertisements. Song airlines focused on specifically not making arguments. They focused on visuals, music, and symbolism. These elements were made to create feelings, rather than arguments.

One thing to make note of is the fact that these are completely different videos with completely different purposes. Yes, both sets of videos are created to persuade people. However, one set of videos is geared towards creating lasting customers and primarily persuading people to buy something. The other set was created to persuade citizens of a country to vote for a person. The creators, then, have different things to pull from. Voters' freedom, liberty, and patriotism is focused on as a responsibility. The commercials tend to create a culture out of imagery that focuses on feelings, as well as telling the audience that the audience has a problem (and the creators of the ad have the solution to that problem). Now, of course, there is plenty of overlap, but the mindsets are different for the end result, so the strategies do differ.

As the video The Persuaders talked about, success in advertizing and persuading goes beyond logic. This is why advertizing companies study cults and apply theories of that sociology to exploit peoples' need to belong. In both advertizing to sell and advertizing to vote, the goal seems to be to create loyalty beyond reason. Even if this is not the goal, it is definitely the end result. People have loyalty without thought, and it's scary on any side of the spectrum. We are a society conditioned to avoid the use of our most precious gift: the freedom to think.

WDIGTS Waiting on Formal Crits & Developing Motion Graphics

I've been talking to the people reviewing my materials, and, so far, they are telling me that I should look through books' table of contents and that it looks pretty comprehensive. I HAVE looked through books, which has, hopefully, helped with covering bases. I think that graphic design will be where most criticism comes. I'm looking forward to getting input from Kristin and Melissa.

I'm pretty excited about the motion graphics for this project. I think that I am leaning towards a drawing effect. I want to stay away from studio looking visuals, because I don't have access to the 100s of 1,000s of dollars worth of equipment to record looking nice, and recording specific equipment will date my materials much more than staying with generic visuals like camera and lens, rather than specific models.



There is an example when the video separates into quarters of the drawing effect that I may go for. [1:14] I used this in a class project for a class taught by Kevin Williams. I've grown a lot since my first semester of college, and I think that I could do a much better job, especially now that I'm not working on a cheap laptop that would make me wait fifteen minutes per preview.

I'm also very excited for the sub videos for the categories. I will be creating these, bearing in mind that I will be using these videos on a loop as one of my primary displays at our showing. I want them to flow well, but I want them to be individual videos, as they will be viewed independently through the actual website.