The Process of building animage through

video ads

Rod de Lima LopesUNIFIEO - Brasil

rod@limalopes.nethttp://limalopes.net

34th ISFCSummer 2007

Aims

Analyse the relationship between Verbal and non-verbal codes

Determine how the identity of the company and itsproducts is built.

Analyse the flow of information takes place in themovies

Analyse how the visual metaphor is build

Background

Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1973,1985, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004)

Multimodality (Kress & Leeuwen, 1996, 2001;Baldry & Thibault, 2006; Norris, 2006, 2004, 2002;Kong, 2006; Martinec & Salway, 2005)

Technical Video Issues (Zetll, 2004; Sadun, 2003)

Corpus

Three video ads (from a larger corpus of 24) of 30seach

Promoting sales of hardware manufactured byApple Inc.

Ads are broadcast on TV, exhibited at Apple Storeand streamed through internet

Commercial campaign is on the wire since July2006

Codec QuickTime H.264 / 848X840 / 29 fps

Results Strategies for creation of identity:

Personification Stereotypes Comparison

Verbal and non-verbal language are used in buildingmetaphors Both are equally important

Information flow takes place through three main strategies: Gaze Framing Gestures Verbiage

Mov 1 Mov 2

Mov 3

Mov 2

Hello, I’m a Mac

Hello, I’m a PC

Full shot - 2 people

Medium shotMac bring new info

Full shot - 2 peoplePC and Mac say same info, now given, together

Medium shotPC develops this info

I’m a MacAnd I’m a PC

Full shot - 2 people Medium shot Knee shot

Medium shot Medium shotMedium shot

Medium shot Medium shot Medium shot Medium shot

Digital camera and isolationmetaphor

The virus metaphor

The crashing metaphor

Network metaphor

Conclusions

The company represents its products and thecompetitors as two highly stereotyped people,comparing their capacity of doing a number ofmultimedia tasks. As a result, the advertisercreates a discourse setting that describes itsproducts as “modern”, “new”, “userfriendly”, less likely to have problems

Contributions

Initial observation of the relationship betweenverbal and non-verbal language in movie pictures

Analysis of the recourses used for establishingthe flow of information in movie pictures

Discussion of the concepts of Theme and Rhemein movie pictures.