Olivia Clifford: Week 3 Analysis

What themes or concerns in the presented reading are your responding to?
I am responding to the prompt, which was to select a commercial and create your own ekphrasis in response to it. The commercial I had chosen was one that is now pretty old, yet at the time, it was one that everyone knew: the freecreditreport.com commercial. In it, the man dressed as a pirate tries to convince the viewers to head over to freecreditreport.com to avoid any issues that could involve identity theft and could potentially damage their life. The commercial focuses on selling the website as something that is useful and could help people, yet they do it in a fun, lighthearted way, which is something I was sure to point out in the beginning of my response.

What are the materials and processes you used to formulate your response? Why these? If several, which are you most concerned with?
I simply went onto YouTube and searched for this commercial. It was an advertisement I knew I wanted to use, considering that even though it is almost 10 years old, I still catch myself singing the song from time to time. This ad was so popular that TV Guide Magazine even did a short feature piece about who the man singing in this commercial is. I figured that something so memorable deserves to be recognized.

Why these materials and processes. What are their limitations? What do they allow?
I suppose that simply searching for the commercial on YouTube did not allow me to tap into my creativity when coming up with my response for this week. However, it did allow me to appreciate the advertisement once again. This is one of the few commercials that I can recite word for word. The makers succeeded in what they wanted, which was most likely to get it to stick in your head until you ultimately type freecreditreport.com into your web browser.

What choices did you make? (For example, the tone of a piece of writing, or the lighting decisions for a photograph.) What led your decision-making about them?
Before simply writing what the commercial was about I chose to open up with a short paragraph giving an introduction as to what the ad is and how it is successful. To me, it seems sort of like a tagline for a television show one would read when looking through the guide to find something to watch. It describes the commercial in a way that makes you want to know more. 
What influenced me to make this decision was probably my Screenwriting for TV class. In that class, we discussed log lines, which are a short description of a show that could grasp the attention of the people you are pitching the show to. In class we did a short workshop working on log lines and when I read mine aloud, a classmate told me it sounded like a description they would read on Netflix. I had fun with this exercise and decided to try it out again, but instead with a commercial, which proved to be a challenge, considering it is only a 30 second video.

What did you learn through this response? (You can address new knowledge or new questions you’ve gained regarding the class reading, the materials/processes you used, or both.)
Through this response, I learned that even the shortest videos are capable of having Netflix-type descriptions attached to them. It was a fun exercise that I decided to try out and I feel I was pretty successful with it. Also, I learned what exactly ekphrasis is and that it can be done in many different ways.