Advert Analysis - Vans

 

This is an advertisement promoting Vans Old Skool Collection, which is a collection of shoes from Vans, this was released at 2017. This advertisement mainly promotes the various design they have, also showing the diverse use of their shoes. The goal of their advertisement is to show their designs while telling us that we can use their shoes for various uses; dance, trips, skateboarding etc.

Media Language

The theme of this advertisement is somewhat retro, combination of jump cuts and stop motion. With addition of colorful background that is overlayed with the photos/videos also gives the vibes of 90s-00s. The filters that are used in a lot of the pictures and videos are also inspired by film cameras making the whole advert look more retro and somewhat vintage. The music in the video is also like country-rock which also help delivering the vibes towards the audience.

Audience

Here I think the target audience is everyone for age 15-30 year olds, their social class could be for middle class. Their hobbies could be skateboard, bikes, photography, going on trips, dance and music. This may also focus to those with “young energy” basically those with a more adventurous and sporty personality. 

Representation

I feel like this advert mainly represent those who “prioritize” freedom. There is no explicit stereotype shown here but we can actually tell these shoes are beloved by skaters, musicians and artists.

Industry

This advert is made possible through simple editing and stop-motion. As we see from the advert, machinery is used to create the product which promotes the sleek, quick and accurate production of shoes. 

Using social media such as Youtube also help spreading and promoting the products to be seen by their target market; skaters, younger people etc.

Competitors

Puma 

This advertisement is promoting Puma Suede, which is a collection of shoes from the brand Puma. This ad is released 4 years ago, in 2018. This advertisement main purpose is to promote the versatileness of the product usage and the design as well.

Media Language

The general theme of the advert is focusing more towards streetwear, we can see as most of the scenes are shot on the streets. This also use a combination of stop motion and various more eccentric angle shots which may also symbolize the a lot of uses and freedom of using their product. This can also be symbolize by a lot of changes in the music from trap to modern and back to trap and hiphop. Medium shots of the people that participate and the stop motion of the shoes that they use also shows a lot of different people can use suedes and can do a lot of things in it as well.

Audience

This advert mainly focus on generations of musicians, b-boys, illustrators, photographers, toy makers, fashion producers, DJs, tattooists and others (as taken from description). The target audience age is most likely almost around all ages as we can see combination of younger and older people in video, and we see that this is targeted on the generations, it is also for all genders with social class of middle.

Representation

We can see the target social class is middle as the shots is taken on streets; rather than enclosed space like a studio. Street as seen as a free place so the talents focus more on fun and freedom than let’s say elegance. Puma also uses artists and legends from SE Asia - Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Industry

This advertisement is done mostly on camera and editing as we can see a combination of stop motions, cuts, overlays etc. There is also a scene about process of production. Puma also uses social media to promote their products to reach target audience. Using artists from SE Asia can also attract people from those media as they are rarely used in other advertisement; new flavor.

Concept

Product: Vans Old Skool

Setting: Rooftop

     Reason: Because I really like the designs and the color, I like Vans because they are comfortable and 

     easy to use for different things

                 

Storyline:

1. Girl shows up in rooftop and turns on phone and speaker with another brandless shoes

2. Girl does activities then shoes broken

3. Girl looks upset and ran down, along the street

4. Sees Vans store and goes in

5. Pans along the collection and close up to girl taking one shoe

6. Bought it and used it

7. Girl ran and does other things then goes back to rooftop

8. Dance through the sunset, fade to black

Storyboard

Film Poster Groupwork

 Research

First Genre - Horror

For this genre, my group chose these 3 references; Fright Night, Freak Show AHS and Tonight She Comes.

Critical Reflection - Film Poster

Critical Reflection - Film Poster Y.A Fantasy

The media that I will use is the movie poster with title of The House with our chosen genre of young adult, specifically fantasy. 

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issue?

My product, the film poster of The House in genre of young adult fantasy uses the conventions of East Asian (Chinese) animation films. We can see this by the color pallet that mostly consist of red and touches of gold, which are seen as lucky colors in China. For the title itself we also use the simplified Chinese characters known as Hanzi to further highlight the fact that this movie is based in China, East Asia. For the poster itself we follow most conventions by incorporating these codes; red and gold colors, hanzi and the Chinese aesthetics such as the red string and the type of house used in the poster. But we also challenged a convention by covering the main character's face partially, by this it is because in a lot of c-anime, they rely a lot of main character's visual to attract audiences. So, by covering their face it can create a sense of mystery and make audience more curious about the plot and the aesthetic of the mise-en-scene than fully on the visual of the character.

In our product, we embrace the stereotype of aesthetics of Chinese animation and the typical representation of male to be more adventurous but following the synopsis of the poster, it shows the stereotypical personality of guys being stubborn, rebellious and not knowledgeable.

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Our target audience are those who like animation and east asian aesthetics. Mostly focusing on female audiences as we can see, the main character being male but can still be targeted toward male as it can be considered as a movie with a lot of actions and adventure. The age of our audiences are teenagers (young adult) as the plot maybe perceived to be a bit mature for children and their hobby maybe like books, movies and art. The audience may fall into categories of explorer and struggler where their main core is discovery and escape.

If this become a real media text, it will be produced professionally by graphic designers. Although I don’t have a specific designer in mind, I would prefer those who are based in East Asia with deep understanding of the aim of the poster without creating controversies and goes against stereotypes. In terms of where I think this ad will be shown, I would say it’s very flexible, can be shown anywhere although the main target may be East Asian, I’m sure it can be accepted in other places too.

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

When I first just started doing this, I actually felt very confident and very assured of doing this genre and this project itself. But this actually opened my eyes a lot more, as in there were actually a lot of steps and research that had to be put in while I personally am not fond of doing research so I did backwards step instead where I work my way out by having my final idea in and working around it. So definitely one skill I somewhat improved in is my research skills, and a skill I learned is designing one from scratch. In this project, we did have to make a lot of changes throughout and most of them being pretty last minute, for example we changed our mind of the design of the poster entirely to make it better.

But from this experience, I found out I feel more comfortable in concept development comparing to analysis (research) and designing although I can still feel a lot of possible room of improvement in all of the stages. 

How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware and online - in this project?

For this project, I rely on my iPad the most, we used Picsart, Phonto and Pinterest the most, I also used Goodnotes to explore the fonts in Hanzi. I used Pinterest mostly in the research part, to look for the inspiration posters and also to find the main picture that is in our final draft, which is the background picture. We used both Picsart and Phonto for the editing section, Picsart was for combining the pictures, adding extra elements towards the poster and to basically creating the background to be what we wanted. We used Phonto to edit the text, to add the word components of the poster, such as the title, production company and actors. We used Jamboard for our collaborative research as there we can also do handwritten annotation which in my opinion is very useful when we were doing the analysis. We used blogspot for the collected, final information, although at first I find it a bit tedious but I find it really nice as it organizes the information really well making it easier to process.