Advertisement and me

The type of advertising i find most successful is fast food advertising, I'm a bit of a fast food addict, and find it quite difficult to resist a burger. I like to put this down to the good advertisements these places have. I havn't personally seen the image at the top, but i think it is a good example of a successful add.

I think that these sorts of adds have become such a part of our lives people just tend to become unaware of them. Mcdonalds is everywhere, you just simply can't escape it. It infiltrates your city, your home, your work, your bus, your computer, your everything. The snippet we watched from the film They Live by John Carpenter relates to this concept very well.

I feel like that all the time (minus the glasses). Everything in the city is telling you something or wants something from you. I must have a whole barrage of filters up to prevent my mind from overloading (I get this burning mental image of the guy who put up yellow paper/plastic all over the adds in the city when i think of this, too bad i can't remember his name). I like to think in the movie my filters are his glasses, and this makes me think is that really a good way of advertising? If i'm abel to filter out such things, would less adds be more? would i notice them more if they were harder to see and not so in your face?

One thing that draws me to this add is how good the burgers actually look. No burger looks that good when you receive it, but even if you aren't hungry most people won't find it hard to crave a burger when they see one so made up. Another technique used by Mcdonald's here is their logo, sitting on top of an intense red background the bright golden arches seem inviting and quite happy. People who eat this food will start to associate this image with the good feeling of chowing down on one of these burgers.

The good thing about this day and age is that people are striving to be aware of all the little tricks that are being played on them. So most of us already know about Mcdonalds, add campaigns, and how companies are quite deceptive to get you to have and then want their product.

People who are aware of this quite like to make images and comment about it. Taking an original promo image and changing it to tell a different (most often opposite or truthful) statement is popular for young designers and artists, here is just a gaggle of images iv'e found on google. In return to these sorts of images I think Macas has wizened up, and is probably a little bit sick of being taken the piss out of. The link below is to a website that has a few new and creative adds by Mcdonalds. I actually quite like some of these images and think they are really clever, I also think it will be a lot harder for haters to manipulate these images to put Mcdonalds down.

I don't want it to sound like I am for or against fast food here, I just think it is interesting how add campaigns can change depending on the publics perspective of that company.

http://www.inewidea.com/2010/01/11/17764.html

Materiality, Surface, Affect, Site.

I really like Katsushika Hokusai's work The Great Wave of Kanagawa. As this work was done quite along time ago, and is from a different culture I had to do some research to fully understand it- wikipedia wasn't that helpful. Although it did say that most westeners would view it wrong-"the normal, traditional way to view the print would be from right to left, implying that Hokusai’s Great Wave was designed to tumble into the viewer’s face, so to speak”. This leads your eye down into the big wave and spits it out onto Mt Fuji, does this mean that Mt Fuji is the focus of the woodblock print? Probably, considering this piece is only one out of 36 in a series called Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Mt Fuji is pretty well worshiped in Japan and I'd say this print is quite popular because of that.

In the lecture you mentioned the style of Superflat and the artist Takashi Murakami. I did a little bit of work on him last year, and really like him. I love this style as it makes for very interesting paining. I looked at the two painting's above done by Murakami and tried to view them 'traditionally'. However this did not seem to work. Murakami's work is based around the culture of Otaku, witch is pretty much gaming culture in Japan. Murakami has colaborated with other brands and people like Louis Vuitton and Kanye West.

The way Murakami lays out his work is quite like Katsushika's Great Wave. When you said it is flat and has a minimal amount of depth I emidiatly thought of Takashi's works. It seems as if it is made of heaps of different layers and the image has just been flattened. I think though, with Murakami's paintings there is no one focus, it is the overall that the layers create that is the focus. This contrasts to the Great Wave, where it seems the goal is to portray Mt Fuji.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Great+Wave+off+Kanagawa-a0144047882 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa

Narratives and Archetypes / Star Wars a New Hope

The Star Wars character I chose to write about Luke Skywalker. I chose him because he is the hero of the whole saga, this means he has to be attractive as a character and George Lucas definitely achieves this for me. Luke represents a lot of things for me, as a kid he was my hero. Now for me he sort of represents the kid at school who could never do anything wrong, ironically at school I was never that kid.

As a character I think Luke is pretty stereotypical, I would liken him to Neo off The Matrix, the Night Owl off the Watchmen and possibly Indianna Jones. All these characters share one vital thing in common and that is that they are all solidly good at heart. Obviously they all go through their different journeys and conflicts but ultimately arrive at the same destination due to their one defining characteristic. Maybe Luke wouldn't seem so stereotypical in 1977. The whole film is based around Luke and his journey. The ideas and themes you can draw from the film are a product of this journey.

Another character that I thought id talk about although not my favourite is Anikin Skywalker. I like the second trilogy and Anikin because they don't have a happy ending. This is quite a contrast in comparison to the first 3 films. The main characters also contrast against one another but in a parallel kind of way. I feel this sort of ending and themes is not common for sci-fi films, but may have started a trend. Avatar has the same sort of evil undertone and ending, I enjoy it.

I really liked this lecture, and like the idea of the dream world that never ends. As a kid i always had sci-fi dreams some of them were quite scary haha. I think that is why I like Sci-fi films so much, because you can just watch and escape. An extreme case in this age would be Avatar, I herd of people becoming seriously depressed after seeing the film. Because of how beautiful and dreamlike the world is in that film.