Public Service Announcement Video Project: WASH'D

Reflection: The most challenging part of this assignment was deciding on an idea to focus on. We all had different ideas and preferences but none of them were totally developed since we were unsure of what to expect for a final product. I don't think any of us had made a PSA before, so we weren't sure what direction to take it. The most rewarding part of the experience was getting it all done. After we finished filming, we all felt pumped about what we had just recorded. I think we were all a bit worried about how it was going to turn out but then we were able to work efficiently together when we got to it. We finally just trusted that it would work out and it did!

EdTV Extra Credit Movie Review

EdTV is a movie released in 1999 featuring Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman, Ellen Degeneres, and Woody Harrelson. The plotline is that a television station begins to follow the life of an average guy, Ed, (McConaughey) live for 16 hours a day. To the surprise of the producers and everyone involved, the show turns into a huge hit. A range of people become glued to the show, even putting their own lives on hold so as not to miss any part of Ed’s life. One viewer admits that he tries to only pee when Ed needs to pee since that is essentially the only part of his life that is not aired on national television. The inner workings of his life are upturned with the real-time broadcasting and crossings of emotions with the relationships he has with family and friends. A catch to the contract he initially signed designates that he cannot leave the show without the show deciding to do so nor can he interrupt his daily life activities for risk of breach of contract. Essentially he is locked in to having his life a constant broadcast no matter what he does.

It is interesting and terrifying to see how the network pushes the boundaries of what is morally okay. Their contract is worded so that they basically own Ed’s life. He becomes a zoo exhibit of sorts (which to me raises questions about the ethics of zoos…) where the intimate details of life become all for show. He does a pretty fantastic job of not letting it go to his head as most people would likely be tempted. Ed doesn’t act to boost his ratings; he is able to resist whatever temptation that holds just to live his life out as normal. One thing his love interest Shari says is fascinating, she says that she isn’t going to do anything to entertain his audience and is pretty horrified by the whole ordeal.

In a situation like this it seems difficult to continue living your life for yourself. The subject of the television show would get bombarded by the wants and desires of the thousands of viewers that each want something in their personal interest. The subject’s life could easily be lost to the moldings of the gross desires of people caught with the power they feel they can hold over the person’s life. It’s like in Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together, when children act viciously towards their robotic dolls because they find malicious pleasure in the power they have over the seemingly animate doll. The movie ends happily with Ed finding a way to get his life off the air, but the point that the film makes is hard to ignore. There is a fine point between the convergence of our lives and the media in a culture moving from privacy to surveillance. 

Environmental Advertisement Media Matrix Analysis

This is a critical analysis of the advertising techniques that this company uses to promote its product in this video commercial. I bought one of these jackets at the start of last winter and my friends immediately recognized it as the jacket that "those crazy people in bathing suits wear in all those new advertisements." I hadn't seen them so they told me to check them out...

Video of the crazies playing in the snow:

THESIS: a new jacket technology from Columbia that keeps you warm no matter how cold it gets

TRIUNE BRAIN:

Neocortex- the spoken advertisement isn’t in English so the audience has to read (use their higher thinking) to comprehend the meaning

Limbic- the advertisement is a video of a series of cuts and images that appeals to our emotional brain

Reptilian- the advertisement is aiming to catch the attention of the audience by opposing the flighting reaction of the lizard brain that would normally direct us to avoid plowing through large snow banks whilst naked

EIGHT SHIFTS:

Epistemological shift- (shift from word to IMAGE) the focus of this advertisement is on the crazy action that is being presented visually rather than the spoken words which is demonstrative of the shift that is occurring in our 21^st century media culture

Aesthetic shift- (from discrete to CONVERGENCE) this advertisement isn’t participatory but it gives the feel of a youtube.com video like it was submitted by an everyday user not a corporation

Economic shift- (HYPER commercialism and CORPORATE consolidation) again, this doesn’t totally apply in the meaning of an economic shift in our media culture, but it is similar. This advertisement features someone in Sweden wearing this jacket that they are trying to market in America. There is this international corporate consolidation where jackets being sold in the United States are also being worn in Europe and all over the world.

FIVE "FACTS"/CLAIMS:
1. The lining of this jacket is 20% warmer than “ordinary” jacket linings
2. You will feel instantly warm when you put on this jacket
3. The jacket breathes
4. No matter how cold it gets, you can still be warm without wearing any pants as long as you're wearing Omni-Heat
5. You will have a posse of Swedish women to help you dress if you buy this jacket

There's nothing new about these coats except their lining. The inner fabric is a tight pattern of reflective silver dots that use the age old technology of those emergency space blankets that you always take camping just in case you get mauled by a bear and get stuck in the woods for longer than expected. They reflect your body heat to keep you warm. ( photo credit)

SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF MEDIA EDUCATION:

Emotional transfer- The woman on the snowmobile is smiling throughout the entire advertisement.

Pacing- This advertisement is 30 seconds in length with 13 separate shots. This is relatively few, which gives it a more relaxed feel like the women speaking are speaking directly to the audience.

Production techniques- The shots of the different camera angles are not shot on a steady base. The wobbling effect, lack of inclusion of background music, and the loud whipping of the wind makes the advertisement seem like it was shot by an everyday person that wants to share something great with the audience instead of a wealthy corporation that is trying to market a product.

PERSUASIVE TOOLS:

Humor-This advertisement is showing a Swedish woman in a bikini doing a ridiculous feat of skiing by being propelled by a snowmobile on a frozen lake into a large mound of snow with a target on it for the entertainment of the audience.

Beautiful people- The main promoter of the product is a stereotypically beautiful European woman who has the body of a model which is clad in scanty apparel.

Scientific evidence- The lining of this jacket is 20% warmer than “ordinary” jacket linings.

Denial- The advertisement denies the reality that if a person spends a prolonged period of time with bare skin exposed to the elements they will not be in pain or suffer from frostbite.

Simple Solutions- In response to that pattern of denial, once the woman puts the OMNI HEAT jacket on, she will no longer be cold or at risk for frostbite even though her legs are completely exposed.

Bandwagon- The woman has a posse of two other women wearing the same jacket in the same color supporting her endeavors.

Hyperbole- “No matter how cold it gets outside, it’s always warm inside Omni-Heat.” This is an exaggerated claim that it could get to be -50 degrees Fahrenheit and the jacket would still keep a person warm. It also implies that once you are wearing the jacket, you are no longer outside and susceptible to the elements of snow and wind.

Repetition- The woman says Omni-Heat twice and the screen shows the words another two times to really emphasize that it is Omni-Heat that is so wonderful. This commercial is also one in a series of several advertisements of people doing weird things in the snow without much clothing to demonstrate the wonders of this new jacket reflective-lining technology. 

A Closetful of Lemmings

This isn't actually my old house's closet but it may have well been,
this is nearly exactly what it looked like...I found it on Google here.

Okay, so the house I grew up in until the end of second grade was tiny. I don’t think you could have a house that was smaller and still consider it a house; except for those teeny tiny houses that are part of the Small House downsizing countermovement that can compete with Thoreau’s lovely abode in Concord…

In my family’s teeny tiny house, our coat closet for coats and umbrellas and such was less of a coat closet and more of a study; a study where we kept our computer. So one of my first memories involving computers is me sitting on a big swivel chair (by big I mean tiny since it had to fit in the closet, but gigantic-looking with me sitting in it) playing lemmings. That’s right, I don’t know if any other 90’s babies remember this game, but that one with super pixelated animation of little men following each other off cliffs unless you built a wall or bridge to redirect them.

After that game, lemmings were always something that I was really into but really had no clue what they were. What I discovered with a quick wiki search is that they are actually pretty cute. They look like little hamsters. But what blew my mind is where they live. Get this—lemmings are ARTIC RODENTS. What?? Apparently they live in tundra. In the snow.  To me that just sounds like the name of the band, the Artic Monkeys; something ironic that doesn’t actually exist (right?? I don’t actually have any clue..). Check out this video, I feel bad for the little buddy because he seems scared out of his mind but I was intrigued merely by the weirdness of the little dude.

To sum up what I was getting at, I didn’t use the computer much pre-middle school given where we kept our computer. Also, without internet there wasn’t much use I would have had for a computer as a kid. I wasn’t about to type out a 10-page word document and even if I did have the internet I don’t feel like it would have caught my attention in that point in its development. My family actually didn’t get internet until after my brother got to high school, so maybe 2003? I would have been in seventh grade. II remember noticing as a sixth grade that I felt disconnected or behind without the internet by that point. That's when of course I started going on the computer regularly. I would need it for school to research for projects and then I got a Yahoo account which turned into a Google account. At the beginning of my freshman year of high school, I got a Facebook and then I started blogging my senior year for a class. Now I have this personal blog, and last night I created a twitter...There are so many different media for web interaction..it seems a bit overwhelming, right? Nowadays, every single website has a login and personalized something. I also have a stumbleupon, an etsy, a pinterest, a skype, a vevo, picasa web albums, a dropbox, a walgreens photo account. And three or possibly more different emails. It has gotten to be far more accounts that I can even remember...

This guy Bob who gets the photo cred, also calls them funnies..is it a Boston thing?

Getting back to when I was younger, my media exposure was more based on more traditional outlets like tv, books, and the newspaper before the time of Webkins. For whatever reason, what comes to mind are Christmas movies: Charlie Brown’s Christmas and The Snowman. I never watched Saturday morning cartoons, I didn’t have cable. I’m pretty sure I read the comics in the newspaper “or the funnies” from the Boston Globe every week on Sundays because that is when they were in color and had a full five pages instead of the usual single page black and white section. 

(photo cred)

As I got older, I started to  read more books. I loved the Little House on the Prairie books and I read all of the Magic Treehouse books. I liked first-person narratives that made you feel like you feel like the speaker was your best friend. Books were my window to the rest of the world outside the suburb where I lived. In middle school I loved the book Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan. And The Giver by Lois Lowry. They were books about different world's, the first about a different culture and the second about an imagined world. Another thing, is that I always remembered the names of the authors, it was like a way of meeting people. I still have never read The Kite Runner or A Thousand Splendid Suns but I learned the author's name, Khaled Housseini, a long time ago for whatever reason. Now when I read articles for my Journalism class on the computer, I have to remember to even read who wrote it.

My parents read to me a bunch when I was younger. My mom loved books like, Goodnight Moon, and books illustrated by Eric Carle. The really simple yet artful ones. She is all about simplicity. My parents would read Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales to me, the old Winnie the Pooh, Harold's Purple Crayon, Blueberries for Sal, and Chinese folktales; Lon Po Po and Tikki Tikki Tembo.

(photo cred)

These books are actually fairly telling of my personality now. Like Little House on the Prarie, I’m always looking for adventure. Like my favorite fairy tale, The Wild Swans, I’m really into resourcefulness (haha..). Like Eric Carle I love creating beauty out of the everyday. And about the Chinese folktales and Homeless Bird, I am fascinated by culture. At this point in my life, I sadly don’t read too much. I am mostly consumed by my computer. It would have been nice if it hadn’t ever left my closet. 

(photo cred)  

(photo cred)

(photo cred)

Nice to meet chya =]

Hi my name is Amanda Chin and this is my blog, Keep calm and Carry your spork. I grew up in a suburb six miles outside of Boston in Arlington, Massachusetts. It’s a cute little historical town that prides itself on the fact that Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride that started the American Revolution took him through it.  And celery. Arlington grew delicious celery in the 1800’s. (A fun fact that I learned this summer while chatting up my co-workers who were all about 40 years older than me, give or take, while working the polls of a town election. I heard some good war stories too.)

Robbins Farm Park or "Skyline Park," (photo cred to ken ken)

Anyway, I am currently a sophomore at the University of Vermont, majoring in Environmental Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. I haven’t yet declared a minor or an ENVS concentration but in the future, I hope to work for a non-profit with a mission that addresses both environmental and social justice issues. I probably got on this whole track the summer after my junior year of high school when I worked my first summer of two at The Food Project, an organization with the vision of “a world where youth are active leaders, diverse communities feel connected to the land and each other, and everyone has access to fresh, local, healthy, affordable food.” It’s a non-profit, Boston-based farm with a number of different land plots in suburban and urban areas that works to empower a diverse group of youth to advocate for food justice in their own communities, while growing together.  One critical thing out of many that I learned from my time there, was how simply community could come together with a common goal to accomplish something really big. Like a bunch of teens learning to farm while breaking down racial and class boundaries. And then going to run a farmer's market in the inner city where there would otherwise be no access to fresh vegetables.

Harvesting Lettuce in Lincoln, MA (TFP)

So from there, I kept getting involved with a bunch of different organizations that all seemed to have a common thread of social justice, which eventually led me to the conclusion that it was an interest of mine. On campus, I am currently involved with the Eco-Reps program through the UVM Office of Sustainability, FeelGood (gourmet grilled cheese to sustainably end world hunger), The Dewey House of Civic Engagement,  and the Garden Club through Slade (student co-operative living community).

Eco-Reps helping with freshman move-in day (Eco-Reps)

This past summer while I was living on an eco-village/farm/yoga & meditation retreat center/heaven, called Metta Earth Institute, I was informally trained to facilitate a three-hour long Generation Waking Up workshop that is meant to motivate my generation, our generation, to get connected and make social change a.k.a. inspire us to get shit done. Here's a really cool video that is a part of the presentation from a partner organization called, Four Years Go:

So that's a little bit me! I can't wait for the rest of the year and to see where it brings me. Ciao for now :)