#vislit

Final Visual Literacy Project F2015

December, 2015

Music Video Review

Waka Waka (Esto Es Africa)- Shakira- World Cup 2010

This is one of my favorite music videos of all time because if you haven’t realized it yet, I love looking at the differences and similarities between cultures. The World Cup is literally one of those events that bring the entire world together every four years. It is one of the most human things that human being partake on. Suddenly your individual life is forgotten and you unite with millions of others that have only one thing in common with you- you relate to the country you are feverishly cheering for. 

Now, as for the actual music video, it did a wonderful job depicting just that mania that the world partakes in for a couple of months every four years. There’s a really cool combination between clips of old soccer matches, Shakira dancing and the most well-known players posing and doing little tricks with the soccer ball. The video is in itself a perfect representation of the fútbol community and how it brings the Earth together. The video uses World cup games with some definitive moments from the past to show the former champions of the world. 

The makers of the video were careful to deliberately use vivid, lively colors to show that South Africa (where the 2010 World Cup was held) was teeming with energy and that it was a place for vibrancy and spirit. There’s colors that really stand out such as red, green and yellow in some instances, but there is a very good variation between the colors to show how diverse and eccentric a cultural exchange can be. In the beginning of the video there is a little clip of an Italian player (that I’m pretty sure is footage from the 2006 World Cup) and it shows that he is ready to make the penalty shot, and that is a perfect representation of how tense and competitive the games sometimes get. The makers of the video did a splendid job in capturing the humanity of the situation. Famous players (Messi, Pique, and Dani Alves) are all shown to bring familiarity to the video so as any soccer fanatic could see the video and instantly feel like they can relate. There’s even clips of children playing soccer around the globe, saying that there is no race, age or class in the world that is excluded from partaking in a game of fútbol. It was also great how Shakira included regional, native dance moves and steps from the people of South Africa, and how the beat of the song and the small snippet that is in another language sung by an African woman are included because it shows that we can all learn from cultural exchanges. 

Nighthawk Painting Video

Juana Capelluto

Claire Holmberg

Laura Katkus

‘Serenity’

November 2015

This has honestly been one of my favorite commercials since middle school and although now that I’m older I realize how culturally-marginalizing and racist this is... I can’t help but to laugh at the underlying truth that everything DOES sound better in Spanish (Disclaimer: I am allowed to say this, I am a native Spanish speaker). 

Even from the opening line, man “Here in Veracruz, Mexico, we speak Spanish, mostly because it is the language that we speak” as the obviously Latin woman walks on the center of the screen towards us, because she never takes her eyes off of her audience- it addresses the audience all throughout. Even the dramatic flamenco music in the background give it an overall dramatic, zesty vibe that is typically related to most Latin stereotypes. 

It’s interesting how in the opening scene, the camera trucks right to get a feel of the marketplace with all of the fruits and vegetables as the woman comes into play, I think it is to depict how you are now in a foreign place, or a more rural place at least.

There are dolly shots (in and out) throughout and it gives it the more dramatic feel of what a stereotypical Latino commercial would look like. Also there is extreme close-up shots of the woman’s face, because yes, latin drama, and it is so stereotypical it is hysterical. 

Alfred Hitchcock’s visual adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s short story ‘It had to be Murder’ titled ‘Rear Window’ took a few artistic liberties in regards to details along the plot of the original work. 

The details regarding the artistic liberties regard the addition of characters in order to manipulate the plot in a more aesthetic way, such as how in the short story, the main character, Jeff, has no romantic interest, but in the movie, his girlfriend plays a massive roll in helping him solve the mystery of the murder. She acts as a friend, a guide, a reflection of his inner-feelings, which in the short story is played by his helper, Sam, which in the film is also doubled onto the roll of his insurance company’s nurse. 

The creation of the romantic interest also allowed for a deeper character development of Jeff, since we were able to look more deeply into his life and into his career, which was the life of a photographer, or as Lisa put it, “a spectator” which is what he is since he mainly spies and figures out the lives of his neighbors. His main struggle in this film is to decide whether to play an active, or a passive role in his neighborhood, a question every spectator must at least once ask himself. 

There are many “gramatical” uses of this film in order to further convey the director’s main goal of the piece. Deliberate choices such as the great amount of high-angle shots, and how there is no scene in the entire film that was shot outside of the small room or out of Jeff’s point of view, only add to the limited perception that we are exposed to, making us feel as Jeff feels and discover things as Jeff does.  

It was also very effective how the director of the film decided to frame each of the neighbor’s window as a square, symbolizing each neighbor being exposed by a TV screen, because in television shows, the actors aren’t supposed to be aware of having any audiences and people look into their lives as a form of entertainment, which is exactly how Jeff saw his very own neighbors, as a way to pass the time, as live, unscripted entertainment, the premature version of reality television programs. 

I liked how there were barely any references to the time era in the short story, and it could have happened in any decade at any (recent) point in time in the last hundred years, but that Hitchcock decided to illustrate it in the current decade and so we, as the viewers of future generations, get an insight on the personal lives and intimate relations of the society of the nineteen-fifties, with their fashion choices and habits and ways of speaking. It is very demonstrative of the times, and it is always entertaining to see how the times have changed. It is also interesting what was considered to be aesthetically pleasing, or beautiful, at the time, since both of the main actors were considered attractive for their time. Seeing how the standards of beauty have shifted will never cease to amaze me. 

This award-winning short film deals with one real-life scenario and cleverly uses three metaphorical ones to emphasize on the feelings of the main character-the viewer, during an innocent, joyful real life experience.

The scene unfolds to an omniscient voice that directly places the viewer into the shoes of the main character. The color scheme in this scene is extremely fitting since one wouldn’t find those red-orange hues and yellow skies anywhere on our terrestrial landscape. The viewer is clearly on another planet, and the fact that the viewer is the astronaut, only makes it all the more engaging. Color-contrasts are also perfectly used when the astronaut is shown unconscious and “that thing” slides onto his leg. The pitch-black background and red lighting that dramatically illuminates the astronaut work well with the ‘creepy’ background music for the sinister, hellish vibe that the Kamel Films production team was clearly going for.

Not only is this short film pleasing in mere aesthetics such as color schemes and sharp, dramatic shots, but it is also highly satisfying in the terms of plot and story structure. The sudden, unexpected shift to another scenario, in this case the legless, French soldier scene, serves to express the narrator’s indecisiveness as to how to go about comparing the real life situation in the most understandable way possible. The soldier scenes are mostly green-hued and very dark, painting the perfect image of what the trenches must have looked like during the first world war.

By the third time the narrator switches stories, the viewer anticipates the switch and is more curious as to how the three stories relate to one another, aside from being an obvious tale of desperation and life-threatening situations. On that third scenario, the color scheme is predominantly blue, as to emphasize the coldness and the icy helplessness of the drowning fisherman. It was extremely well-thought out that all three scenes nearly almost never showed anything other than the man alone in the lonely depths of the ocean, or alone and legless on a french trench, or alone on an entire different planet, to emphasize the main character’s perceived solitude.

Cleverly, in all three instances, the narrator suddenly remembers the man’s condition to be worse than originally explained, in case it wasn’t bad enough before. And when all hope is lost for all three men, and they give into their respective obstacles and the screen fades into hopeless black, NOPE! PLOT TWIST. “NOTHING LIKE THAT AT ALL” reads the subtitle on the bottom of the screen. The fourth, and real scenario unfolds before us- a child’s foot, girl’s face.

The coloring in the real-life scenario is soft, warm, inviting, joyful. A complete contrast to the boy’s dramatic, sharp, inner feelings represented by all three desperate men that were mere metaphors for the pressure building up inside of him before his first kiss. As for the main focus on the ‘grammar’ of this short film, I’d say that the most used element has definitely got to be the color schemes used to depict the three separate stories of the men. Notice, that all three scenarios are represented by one of the three primary colors used in film post-production; Red, Green and Blue.

Visual Literacy Final Project