More Than Meets The Eye

     When I read the assignment regarding advertisement deconstruction, I instantly remembered the Miss Dior Cherie commercial that I saw for the first time quite awhile ago.The point that it stuck out in my mind is exactly why I wanted to analyze it further.

     There is much more to advertising than simply sharing information about a product. What initially attracted me to this particular clip was the upbeat French music and the whimsical balloons. Even though I'm not sure of the meaning of the song in English, as online translation tools seemed a bit inaccurate, it was still a very catchy tune. The bright colors and overall adventurous feel was also very appealing.

 I started by taking a look at the deconstructing a video advertisement document posted in the module. The prompts and questions within the document helped me to choose items that could be analyzed. It also made me think of analyzing novels for literary elements. It took many views to find visual metaphors, and the product hidden in frames where I initially did not notice it and more. This topic seemed to fit many ideas expressed in the Serafini text.

   

  Specifically there are several elements that Serafini noted such as color and scale. As indicated in my analysis, the colors used in the advertisement had a more feminine feel and included shades of reds, blues, and yellows. The Serafini text stated that each color could have several different meanings. For the purpose of this post, I will only choose meanings relevant to the advertisement. Reds are stated to stand for power, warmth, energy and activity which seemingly fit well with the overall theme of an independent fun-loving main character. Blue tones are stated to represent restfulness, and serenity. These items also fit in with the theme of relaxing and treating yourself. Yellows portray happiness, which is the overall emotion of the video clip. (Serafini pg.58)

    
    Serafini also described the importance of size and scale. It took several views for me to identify how many times the product appeared in the advertisement clip. In certain sections, the bottle of perfume dominated the scene and was larger than the surrounding objects. Serafini indicated this was a crucial part of design as larger items draw the eye in. In other scenes the perfume bottle was not the main focus. My conclusion is that the designer wanted to emphasize the other exciting elements in the frame so that the perfume was assumed to be related to the joyous adventures. (Serafini, pg. 58-59)




Serafini, Frank (text pgs 10-25; or kindle locations 1435-1438). Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy. Teachers College Press.