spamlet

to pee or not to pee

[nikewomen]

[mandacondaa]

Today is Post It Forward day on Tumblr, as you might have noticed on your dashboard. Tumblr says: 

The idea is simple: If you have a message that might help someone through a tough time, then someone out there needs to hear it. 

This semester, I noticed a new Nike Women campaign called #betterforit. I love this campaign because it doesn’t just advertise strength – it promotes the difficult journey to strength, and reminds us that we’re all beginners in the beginning. To me, this is way more inspirational than the picture of success without the story behind it. One Nike gif says, “Be bad until you’re good and good until you’re great”. 

Which reminds me… In 2012, I went climbing with a girl named Christine and a few more experienced friends at Enchanted Rock. It was an introduction to climbing for both of us girls. Yesterday, I came across a series of videos posted by Christine. Since 2012, she has come a long way. The series of videos showed her progress in yoga over time; first, she started off as a beginner, trying hand stands up against the wall. Now, she can do a bunch of hard moves without aid. From her Facebook posts, it seems as if she has become a much stronger climber, too. My climbing story was a little different from Christine’s. While she practiced over the last 3 years, I recovered from an ankle injury and fear of falling. Now, I’m working on becoming more confident and strong in climbing and just life in general. It was interesting and inspirational to see what hard work did for Christine, and made me feel like I could do what she did, too. 

[spamlet]

I really like how your posts are really personal! They are inspiring :^)

[anarsi101]

In creating my final project, I had to consider who my target audience was, and I decided that for once I wanted there to be a practical product that was not gendered. Sometimes it gets kind of ridiculous:

Like what the...

[spamlet]

Even Google glass is promoted by the founder, Sergey Brin, as a masculine technology in this TEDTalk.

[kelly-ngo-deactivated20150714]

For our final project, we advertised the charity event on various social media platforms. Doing so distributed awareness for the cause in an affluence of ways that would otherwise be impossible without social media. Furthermore, this graph shows that donations through social media have increased over the years.

As you can see on this graph, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have the strongest presence when it comes to obtaining nonprofit charity donations. These 3 platforms just so happen to be what Jessica and I used in order to spread word about our final project – we created a Facebook page, a twitter page, and also made a video which we will post to Youtube once it is edited into its final version. In order to achieve donations, we created a gofundme. 

Even if a person does not donate, they will at least be made aware of the cause. According to the graph, only 10% of people would do nothing at all when they come across a post on social media about some sort of cause.

Overall, social media seems to be a great way to raise awareness and is effective in raising money for charities!

[spamlet]

Neat-o

[spamlet]

Our final project is a public service announcement meant to convince the audience to donate to a non-profit charity. I was thinking about how the video itself isn’t really relevant to the cause, and I was getting worried that all our hours of filming would be wasted because of this. However, I also realized that there are a lot of ads that are kind of irrelevant, or at least distant, from the product it is trying to promote. For example, this milk ad that includes the Hulk. What do milk and the Hulk have to do with each other? Nothing (much)! The ad works because of the relationship between the Hulk to the audience, not the relationship between the Hulk and milk. Hulk is not a trusted authority who knows everything about the benefits of milk and we don’t know that he actually drinks milk at all; he is computer generated after all. But we, the audience, recognize him and the use of him to promote milk as a pop culture symbol is what makes the ad work. We are not necessarily a pop culture symbol, but we are using other things such as humor and suspense through visual rhetoric to create an effective argument.

[anarsi101]

Stupidly Gendered Products

In creating my final project, I had to consider who my target audience was, and I decided that for once I wanted there to be a practical product that was not gendered. Sometimes it gets kind of ridiculous:

Like what the hell world, get it together!!

This clearly shows that Mulvey’s assessment that hegemony forces the minorities to view things through the mainstream point of view. Sadly, in this case, the minority is women. I think that it is horrifying that these kinds of products are seen as acceptable. Objects that men and women use exactly the same way, but they have to be gendered because the world needs women to stay pink and frilly and out of the way so they can’t threaten the patriarchy. 

All this does is teach little girls to conform to society, and to think of themselves as innocent and fragile. 

Thanks patriarchy. 

[gabybreiter-blog]

I completely agree

[ihateperformanceart-blog]

oh my god i have been so interested in this idea since last semester. this not only happens with products but roles and ideas. i have been playing with the idea of appropriating things that are meant to be done/worn by women and doing them/wearing them as a man. not as a way to become more feminine but as a way to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, why are these terms still a thing

i guess jaden smith (will smith’s son) is a perfect example of what i’m trying to say. he wears dresses because he believes that clothes are gender free and they shouldn’t be gendered.

[spamlet]

Jaden Smith is the wisest there ever was. Here are some of his best tweets, annotated!!

[spamlet]

Kelly and I spent all weekend and woke up at 6am on Monday to film our final project. It’s actually a video promotion for a personal project we’re doing for charity, so it was really exciting to be able to apply things that we learned in a college course to something we’re doing in real life. 

The process of making a short film is always really tedious but rewarding. It takes forever to shoot a simple 2-minute thing because there are so many aspects in a video that one needs to keep in mind, from the lighting to composition to audio, etc. Editing is also a very long process, especially on Adobe Premiere, which is the program we are using, as there are so many options. There’s always a vision that is in the mind, but it is really difficult to create that and make it real, especially with limited time and resources. But it’s always a learning experience, and we did our best! Working as a team helped a lot; we were able to collaborate and come up with more creative ideas than if I worked by myself. 

Besides creating the promotion, we took some photos, and we’ll be linking our project to theorists that we have studied in class as well. It feels especially rewarding to actually use concepts we learned in Intro to Visual Rhetoric and apply them to create an effective argument through film, which is probably my favorite medium. 

Here is our Final Project v1.

[ihateperformanceart-blog]

http://ustream.tv/channel/straightwhitemale

[ihateperformanceart-blog]

getting everything set up for this!!

[spamlet]

Wow this is cool how do you work for 8 hours straight though???

[spamlet]

Annotated Bibliography

Felton, Julie. "10 Rules for Choosing the Perfect Typeface - Tuts+ Design & Illustration Article." Design & Illustration Tuts+. Tuts+, 12 July 2013. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

In our project, we will be using typography in order to write the title and other necessary messages we wish to include. Choosing the correct fonts will be crucial in order to achieve a persuasive visual argument. This source gives ten rules of choosing the perfect typeface. One of the more helpful rules in this source is choosing the correct mood and combining typefaces effectively. The claim of this article is that fonts have a powerful effect in persuading an audience towards a specific purpose. The author of this article has been a graphic designer and illustrator since 1987 so she is extremely credible and knows what she is doing! This article will help us make an more informed decision while we are deciding on our font choice for our video project.

http://design.tutsplus.com/articles/10-rules-for-choosing-the-perfect-typeface--vector-12548

Bell, Jaclyn. "How to Create the Perfect Public Service Announcement." How to Create the Perfect Public Service Announcement. Center for Digital Education, 2 Mar. 2010. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.

Since our video will essentially be a PSA, we will have to make it effective enough to where the audience will be moved to take action. This source provides helpful information and tips about how to go about creating a PSA, step by step. It starts off by giving advice on how to choose a topic, consider and audience, and then goes on to describe how to grab the audience’s attention. Then it advises to create a script and begin the filming process. This is all extremely helpful since it’s basically a guideline for our project! The writer of this article is a digital media instructor so she is credible, and the purpose of this article is just to inform people on how to make an effective PSA. We will definitely look at this while creating our final project.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/artsandhumanities/How-to-Create-the-Perfect-Public-Service-Announcement.html

Bordwell, David, and Kristen Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997. Print.

Often used as a standard textbook for film courses, Film Art: An Introduction is especially useful for its authors’ attention to style and discussion about how formal aspects of movies create meaning. Its intended audience is composed of film students and anyone interested in studying the history of movies and how movies are written, produced, and distributed. Its purpose is to provide very objective information about film art. This book is definitely written by credible scholars of film and is a useful resource for discussing film and how visual rhetoric applies to this medium in creating persuasive arguments. It is relevant to our project because we’re making a (very) short film and this book will help us form an effective argument through visual rhetoric.

http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~mma/teaching/MS50/reading/Filmart-1.pdf

Olenski, Steve. “What Makes A TV Commercial Memorable And Effective?” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 19 Oct. 2012. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.

This is an online article about the main components of an effective TV commercial. The author came to his conclusions by receiving feedback from TV commercial viewers and what they thought. The intended audience of this article is mainly people who want to learn about how to effectively market their own products and services to consumers via TV ads, and its purpose is to inform this audience about what makes a TV commercial memorable and effective. The article is published on the Forbes Magazine website, a very professional and credible source of information about the business world. The author is a senior content strategist at Responsys, a leading global provider of on-demand email and cross-channel marketing solutions who has also been named one of the Top 100 Influencer In Social Media by Social Technology Review and a Top 50 Social Media Blogger by Kred, making him a very credible source for our research for this project. It is relevant to our project because we are trying to create a persuasive public service announcement, which is very similar to a television commercial.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/10/19/what-makes-a-tv-commercial-memorable-and-effective/

For our final project, we will create a public service announcement promoting a charity event.The question we will be exploring is “How can one use visual rhetoric to create an effective argument through film?” The project will be in the medium of a short film lasting around two minutes. We will write out the script and shot list, film it, and then edit it into a finished product. We will be paying attention to several visual aspects such as lighting, cinematography, mise-en-scene, and typography and observing how these can be used to form a persuasive argument. We will also be applying various ideas from the theorists and scholars and referencing readings that we have studied this past semester in our written portion in order to explore how visual rhetoric can be used in the medium of film.

[ulysseancelerhe315]

Comic Neue fixes the shortcomings of Comic Sans. It’s the casual script choice for everyone, including the typographically savvy.

After today’s talk about Comic Sans MS, and as part of the bitter few that care about Comic Sans, I’d like to invite you to visit the Comic Neue website presenting the free Comic Neue font which was designed to be similar looking to Comic Sans, while remaining somewhat less eye bleeding.

As the creators describe it: “It’s perfect as a display face, for marking up comments, and writing passive aggressive office memos.”

The project was initiated in May 2014, successfully backed on Kickstarter for a total of $10,507. The font was released on August, 1 2014 and recieves updates with new sets of typefaces (oblique, light, book, etc.) since then.

It’s all free, and available for download and install through the Comic Neue website.

Oddly enough, the new typeface changes little from the original one, it is generally lighter and straighter, still feels casual but not necessarily childish and definitely more modern. The only drawback of Coic Neue is that unlike Comic Sans, it is not preinstalled on all computers. However, I have hope that with Operating Systems updates and development of this font, Comic Neue will develop to be the evolution, spiritual son and eventual replacement of Comic Sans. All in all a font that tastes the same, has the same use, but looks a little more up to date.

[spamlet]

This font is pretty lol why was there a Kickstarter for it though? Where does the money go?

[spamlet]

Cool graphic about how to find the right font for your project. It’s a bit more humorous than helpful because a lot of the questions on the map depend on the creator rather than the audience (for example: “Do people call you boring from time to time?” or “You cried while watching Terminator”). The questions should be less dependent on how the creator feels and more on what kind of message he/she wants to create. But I’m not sure what kind of questions would be asked. I guess the questions in the map kind of do address what the creator wants, as long as its consistent with the message the creator wants to send.

I guess I never really thought about how important fonts are for creating a brand image or a certain mood for a sign or logo, so it was pretty interesting and eye-opening to read about typefaces and discuss them in class. All of this newly learned information will probably come in handy to me as an advertising major in the future. 

[spamlet]

Visual Argument 1.2

Original by Kelly!

[spamlet]

I just watched one of my favorite movies ever for the third time this month and it was still as good as the first time I watched it, if not better. Frances Ha, directed by Noah Baumbach. I just wanted to explore some of the visual rhetoric used in this film. 

The first thing one might notice is that the entirety of the film is black-and-white (shot digitally and made monochrome in post-production). Though this film is most definitely modern (released in 2012), the movie is about nothing in particular, with a lot of dialogue about things that aren't too important, essential characteristics of movies that fall under the genre called “mumblecore”. I think the director chose the monochromatic scheme to emphasize the normality and insignificance of Frances’ life. The contrasting tones of blacks and grays and whites also give the film an overall artsy feel, reflecting the free-spirit of the main character. 

The first still follows the rule-of-thirds where the subject is placed on a line as if the full screen was divided into three equal sections. This makes the image a little more interesting than if the subject was place dead center. The second still, however, does the opposite; it places the two characters, Frances and Sophie, on both sides of the middle, mirroring each other. In the movie, they are best friends, but very different from each other. The way that this scene is blocked highlights this paradox, especially foreshadowing their upcoming fallout. The last three stills make Frances, the main character, appear very small, again, highlighting her insignificance.

[spamlet]

Save The Bros. Save The Bros. OrganicValley, 16 Feb. 2015. Web. 23 Mar. 2015.

The intended audience of this video advertisement ispotential customers who would like a healthy and safe way to bulk up bydrinking protein shakes. The purpose is to persuade the said customer that this is the best option of protein shake because of its natural and safe ingredients compared to other drinks that have chemicals. The claim is that “bros” today (males who work out in the gym a lot) drink a lot of toxic chemicals that are unhealthy and detrimental to their bodies and that they need to switch to Organic Fuel, a much better, healthier option. This ad takes a humorous approach, but the effectiveness is limited because not everything in the video is completely true. The authority is a company who is trying to sell a product, so whether this ad is credible or not is up to the audience. This video advertisement is the main subject for my project because I will be analyzing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewBG_jmMI40

Beltrone, Gabriel. "Ad Campaign Hilariously Wants to 'Save the Bros' From the Junk in Protein Shakes." Adweek (2015): n. pag. AdWeek. 17 Feb. 2015. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.

 This article written about the “Save the Bros” campaign was featured in Adweek. Its intended audience is anyone who is interested in advertisements, especially people who work at advertising firms as creative directors, managers, directors, producers, etc. The purpose of the article is to inform advertisers about this unique and humorous new ad that appeared on YouTube. The author also offers a little bit of his own insight on the campaign. He kind of pokes fun at the campaign, even as the campaign is poking fun at itself. It is not very persuasive as it is only informing the audience of an existing ad and offers one person’s opinion on it. However, Adweek is a very reliable source of information and many advertisers follow it for new and innovative ideas for their own advertisements. This is relevant to my project because it looks at the main subject video from an advertisers point of view. http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/ad-campaign-hilariously-wants-save-bros-junk-protein-shakes-162982

I didn’t use an MLA citation for this because it is actually a mass collection of tweets under the search term “#SaveTheBros”. Later for my final project I will handpick a select few that really help my argument. These tweets are part of the “Save the Bros” campaign. The intended audience is each user’s social circle also known on Twitter as their followers. The intended purpose is to spread the word and get some word of mouth publicity going for Organic Valley’s new protein drink.  For each customer, they have incentives of perhaps free products like shirts and drinks. The claim is that Organic Fuel is awesome and everyone needs to try it. It is persuasive because to each user’s followers, the user’s claims are always valid and worth considering; that is why they’re being followed. However, the authority of the creator(s), the people who are tweeting “#SaveTheBros” may not be credible because they have other underlying incentives to tweet about this product. These tweets are relevant to my project because it shows how social media can also use visual rhetoric to make an argument and affect an audience. https://twitter.com/search?q=savethebros&src=typd

 "Save the Bros." Save the Bros. Organic Valley, 2015. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.

This last source is the actual website for Organic Fuel, the advertised product by Organic Valley. The intended audience is similar to the audience of the video: people (especially males) who work out a lot and need a healthy and safe option when it comes to protein drinks for bulking up. The purpose of this website is to provide much more information about the product. There is also more advertising in the way it portrays the product. The website also has “Save the Bros” items for sale. The claim of this source is that this product is the best option because it is organic, healthy, natural, and much safer than the other chemically saturated, toxic protein shakes out there. It is persuasive. The creator behind this website is Organic Valley itself, so everything on the website is biased as the company is trying to sell the audience their product. Savethebros.com

For my final project, I will be analyzing a video advertisement called “Save the Bros” by Organic Valley to show how visual rhetoric can be used to make a persuasive argument for a certain audience. I will be using articles, tweets, and the advertising campaign website itself to help create my argument. I will be looking at how several components such as contrast, color, balance, etc. contribute to the visual rhetoric of the commercial. I will also be referencing some readings we did in class to further illustrate what I have learned in this class and I will incorporate the information to support my argument for this analysis of the video.

[spamlet]

Jay Z Group 1

Our video showing how Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” qualifies as a Rap Music Video.

[spamlet]

I’ve noticed lately that minimalism is very trendy, which applies to anything designed from app interfaces to poster ads to furniture. It’s interesting to compare this aesthetic appeal to say, the very intricate designs of Corinthian column capitals. Or art! I was at the Blanton Museum of Art a few days ago and noticed that the older art is very detail oriented and realistic while modern art often features simple gradients or monochrome colors or blockier shapes. 

Obviously, minimalist interfaces allows for easy access for users. The definition of minimalism is that the subject is stripped down to its bare essentials. So what makes very detailed and complicated pieces more appealing to some and simplistic, smooth pieces appealing to others? Why does the motto “Less is more” work?

Minimalism is easy to learn but hard to master; it’s about stripping away what is unnecessary without changing the purpose of the piece. It leads to less clutter and a less noisy design for audiences. Clutter will only block the point and become obstacles in sending a message to the audience.

As our world grows more complex, minimalism offers a life of simplicity and less stress and distraction.

[spamlet]

Album covers! I know it’d bad but if I’m at a record store browsing looking for artists that I don’t know of yet, I do judge books by their cover; otherwise, what is the point of having album cover art at all! I picked a few of the album covers featured on Pitchforks’s Top 25 Album Covers of 2013 to talk about.

Look at Tyler’s stuff. All of it, in fact: the infamous donuts on Odd Future merchandise like socks and sweathers, all the weird clip art and neon default colors...it makes for an almost ironic statement, yet people wear and love it unironically. Often, the things he raps about is very satirical, which matches his visuals.

Janelle Monae’s The Electric Lady album cover is pretty straightforward: featuring her backups, they’re all wearing matching black and white dresses, facing the camera. It’s simple yet memorable, and the silver skull placed strategically in the corner throws off their innocent look and empowers them as women.

Settle seems innocent: two little boys. Yet something so simple as the contour lines drawn over their faces make it a bit eerie and much more memorable...

Higher features a beautifully marbled circle, reflecting the psychedelic tones of The Horror’s music. Simple, beautiful, straightforward, and unique at the same time. Why hadn’t anyone else done this before??

Abandon. This one is cool because it directs the audience’s feelings; one is probably like “Cool, another pretty pictures of a girl’s legs, very Tumbler-esque. But still nice warm tones, simple, ni-wait, are those...maggots? Wtf, gross...”

A$AP Rocky’s latest album cover is cool because it alludes to his first mixtape, representing how far he’s come and how he will continue to progress. Long live A$AP Rockyyy

And of course, Kanye’s Yeezus album cover had to be featured on this list because he has to be on every list: Most UNDERRATED album of the year AND OVERRATED album of the year?? Only Kanye...anywas this album is obviously iconic in its own ironic way; it’s a simple CD with a red label, making it seem like there is no album art because Kanye’s music and personality is so great he doesn’t need art to accompany it.

[spamlet]

The first picture was the original picture for my visual argument. It's a digital photo my friend took of me in an abandoned house. The second was just another thingy thing I made.