Dreamcatcher
72 hours may as well be not enough and quite a lot of time to produce a media object. For our time given and the skills we have, I think our group made a very decent advertisement video, which cannot be considered to be very common.
The main idea for this advertisement was to be used for the internet, for a website selling dream catchers. The target audience is the active society, the internet users, mainly students and teenagers, as the whole advert is extremely simplified, it basically gives the audience the feeling that if they do not own a dream catcher, they would have nightmares.
Stuart Hall’s Reception theory states that the audience can be broken down to people’s different backgrounds. For instance, if a person shares the similar interests, experiences and cultural background as the author of the media object, he is very likely to fully understand the message, which is sent out by the creator, and the opposite – if he is from a different background he can either partially understand it or not understand it at all. In Dreamcatcher’s case, the different kinds of readings are:
- preferred reading: in this situation the intended message of the advert is absorbed correctly – the person buys the product.
- negotiated reading: here the object is understood, but the person has enjoyed the object but will not go as far as to buy the product
- oppositional reading: the object is again understood, but the person disagrees with it – they consider the advert rubbish and silly
- aberrant reading: here the object is misunderstood or misinterpreted. The person has missed the point of the advert, or they had enjoyed it, but never realised it was an advertisement for a product.
Since the movie is in two parts, the readings can be combined – a person can do a preferred reading on the first part, and an aberrant reading on the second, and so on.
Narrative is a “chain of events in a cause/effect relationship in time and space” (Bordwell and Thompson 1990:55) and here it is very basic – James is our lead character, who is having a problem – nightmares. He acknowledges it, and his solution to the problem is buying a dream catcher.
Todorov and Propp’s methods can be easily used to summarize the story. At the beginning (the equilibrium), James (the hero of the story) is sleeping and having dreams, when the nightmares (the disruption) occurs. Scary personas (the villains) enhance his nightmare. He wakes up, realizes that the nightmare is not over, and when the new day begins, he decides to buy a dream catcher in order to solve his problem (the recognition). He buys and puts up the dream catcher (the helper and the attempt). He falls asleep again, and the nightmare is over – he starts having happy dreams (enhanced equilibrium).
As mentioned by Gillespie and Toynbee (2006:89) a story is “not just what we see and hear. It is the sum total of all the events that are presented to us explicitly, as well as those we infer”. By that they refer to the diegetic and non-diegetic. The diegetic part of the object is everything that is happening in the world of the story – everything know to the characters of the story, while the non-diegetic is everything else used to enhance the influences of the media object. In our case that’s the background sounds and noises and the filters of the video.
If we use Gillespie and Toynbee’s main three points of understanding and investigating narrative, we start with examining the narrative structure. It begins with a person with a certain problem, and it ends with a positive ending – the person has solved his problem. What changes during the narrative is, that the character finds a way to resolve his situation. The second part is that we explore the process of narration, which is quite simple. Person has nightmares, person buys dream catcher, nightmares go away. Third point is to explore the social, political and ideological assumptions – how the story represents groups in certain ways.
As far as gender is concerned in the ad, feminine or masculine stereotypes cannot be easily assigned. It can be said that the main character is not a typical male hero. He doesn’t solve the problem himself – he needs to buy the dream catcher to solve his problem. But yet again, he can be described as a “new age man” – one, that is not afraid to show or admit, that he cannot solve his problems on his own and needs help, he is neither strong nor heroic. The role of the female characters in the video is also not stereotypical. Instead of being passive, attractive to the male audience, or in trouble and in need to be “saved”, they are the exact opposite – they are rather active, as they try to scare the main character, they have a demonic appearance, and in stead of being in need to be saved, the main character needs to be saved from them.
The way the whole video is represented is divided in two – a scary and a happy part. In the first, in order to make the video look like a nightmare, the movement is slightly slowed, and a green filter is added. Distorted, black-eyed demons, changing light and shadows, whispering background sounds. Everything adds up to a very disturbing image, which the audience can easily relate to. After the nightmare, there is bright light and vivid colours, laughter, smiling and happy people, positive and calming music – an the opposite of the terrifying image before it.
Symbolism in the video can be narrowed down to one specific scene. First one is when the male demon handcuffs the hero. It shows that the lead character cannot escape from his dream. It’s inevitable – even when the character thinks he has woken up from the nightmare – it continues.
This viral advert, as successful as it can possibly be, is entertaining, quite catchy and memorable. The symbols and representation methods used really trigger different kinds of emotions in the public. It starts with a bit of mystery, horror, panic, tranquillity, and happiness. It is also made very casual, and with a slight sense of humour, which gets to the audience. I might say, that for the time provided, our group did more than well.
References:
Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin, 1990, Film Art, Berkshire, McGraw-hill Professional
Gillespie, Marie and Toynbee, Jason, 2006, Analysing Media, Berkshire, McGraw-hill Professional
Hall, Stuart, 1980, ‘Encoding/decoding’ in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Ed.): Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson.
