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Video 1: 'Rain for good' WaterAid audio-visual advertisement (2016)
Consider genre – and the significance of subverting genre conventions:
The Water Aid advert reinforces charity advertisement conventions by including key information about the concern, a personalised narrative to which this information is relevant, and a direct appeal to the audience for money.
• However, the fact it lacks a non-diegetic voiceover, melancholic audio codes and black and white visual codes could all be seen as unconventional of this advertising sub-genre.
Consider codes and conventions, and how media language influences meaning:
- The opening medium shot with a pull focus between the digital radio and the rain against the window establishes the advert in a modern, British setting (the audio codes are of an announcer with an English accent). It’s connoted that the scenes that follow (in an unnamed but likely African country) are happening at the same time.
- The visual and audio codes work together to construct the narrative of "sunshine" (in Africa) "on a rainy day" (in Britain) with the associated problems of drought and "lack of access to clean drinking water" that the charity is aiming to relieve.
Consider theoretical perspectives Semiotics – Roland Barthes
- Suspense is created through the enigmatic use of the slow-motion, medium close-up, low-angle tracking shot of Claudia’s feet and the swinging bucket (Barthes’ Hermeneutic Code) and emphasised by the crescendo of the song in the scene at the water pump over which the informative on-screen graphic appears (Barthes’ Proairetic Code).
- Barthes’ Semantic Code could be applied to the lines from the song used from 00.34 diegetically and then as a sound bridge over the medium
shot of a group of women carrying water buckets on their heads: "make me feel, make me feel like I belong… don’t leave me, won’t leave me here". The connotation here being that the text’s audience can help Claudia "feel like she belongs" and "won’t leave" her there / in that situation if they donate to Water Aid.
• The Symbolic Codes (Barthes) of drought-ridden African countries are reinforced both visually and through the advert’s audio codes up until about 00.47.
Structuralism – Claude Lévi-Strauss - How texts are constructed through the use of binary oppositions – at 00.47, the song’s title line "sunshine on a rainy day" is used over shots of children running, playing, laughing and the more positive connotations of this section of the advert are emphasised by the high key lighting used.
- A further visual binary opposition is created between the arid, washed-out, primarily beige and brown colour palette of the advert’s first third and the more vibrant colours used at 01.02.
- The on-screen graphic ("650 million people still don’t have access to clean drinking water") creates a conceptual binary opposition between Claudia’s positive story and that of other, less fortunate people. It’s this opposition that the audience is encouraged to be part of the solution to by giving "£3 today".
Semiotics – Roland Barthes
· The idea that texts communicate their meanings through a process of signification
· The idea that signs can function at the level of denotation, which involves the ‘literal’ or common-sense meaning of the sign, and at the level of connotation, which involves the meanings associated with or suggested by the sign
· The idea that constructed meanings can come to seem self-evident, achieving the status of myth through a process of naturalisation.
Structuralism – Claude Lévi-Strauss
· The idea that texts can best be understood through an examination of their underlying structure
· The idea that meaning is dependent upon (and produced through) pairs of oppositions
· The idea that the way in which these binary oppositions are resolved can have particular ideological significance.
Narratology – Tzvetan Todorov
· The idea that all narratives share a basic structure that involves a movement from one state of equilibrium to another
· The idea that these two states of equilibrium are separated by a period of imbalance or disequilibrium
· The idea that the way in which narratives are resolved can have particular ideological significance.
Genre theory – Steve Neale
· The idea that genres may be dominated by repetition, but are also marked by difference, variation, and change
· The idea that genres change, develop, and vary, as they borrow from and overlap with one another
· The idea that genres exist within specific economic, institutional and industrial contexts.
Postmodernism – Jean Baudrillard
· The idea that in postmodern culture the boundaries between the ‘real’ world and the world of the media have collapsed and that it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and simulation
· The idea that in a postmodern age of simulacra we are immersed in a world of images which no longer refer to anything ‘real’
· The idea that media images have come to seem more ‘real’ than the reality they supposedly represent (hyper-reality).
Video 2: 'No Choice' - WaterAid (2013)
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