water mountaineering

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe3St1GgoHQ

There was an advertisement I found a while ago that I thought would be perfect for this assignment. It depicts a group of sport fanatics who try to run on water. The thing that interested me most was that after watching the video I noticed all the emotion that the video creates into the readers of the advertisement. It does a great job of using romanticism to get the readers of the video to connect emotionally to the ideas presented in the video. Specifically the romanticism of the scene, music score, and actual actors in the video all help to implant feelings of happiness, exploration, determination, and awe to the viewers. Even before reading the rest of this article I would suggest to watch the video to see the video’s effect on those who watch it.

The romantic cinematography of the video plays a great deal into creating the feelings that the readers of the advertisement experience. First of all, the scenery of the video takes place in a very natural looking area. It depicts a completely natural lake surrounded by mountains and green trees. This helps convey the idea of the romantics rural over urban and nature over civilization. By using this romantic ideology the reader gets the feeling of awe. Furthermore the cinematography of how the people are filmed in the video also creates romanticism in the film. When they introduce each member of the team the cinematography shows a short black and white picture of each person with their name and them talking about the sport. This camera effect helps convey the romantic idea of the individual over anything social or collective and develops the emotion of anticipation. This is because the semiotics of black and white pictures correlates to important individuals and greatness about to be discovered.

Furthermore, the music score for this advertisement also has a very romantic sense about it. The video begins with some rural music that has a very natural feeling to it, which goes along with the ideas of mysticism and romanticism. Moreover, the video cuts in short moments of rock music whenever people are successfully running on the water. This creates a feeling of excitement and happiness into the audience of the commercial, while also developing the idea of emotion over fact. The reason behind this is because it doesn’t seem very factual for humans to be able to run on water; however, the emotion built up in the video causes us not to think about this and makes us believe what we see. Even the lyrics of the song promote romanticism and build more feelings into the audience. In one of the songs the lyrics state “no matter how hard you try, you cant stop us now”. This is a clear romantic idea of individual over society. And the tone of this song moves the audience to become determined to do something great themselves.

The actors in this video also portray the romantic in action. The actors themselves have a very optimistic and simple view on the world, which gives the reader of the advertisement the feeling that the actors are childish. Thus the actors portray the romantic idea of child over adult. Similarly, the actors portray the romantic idea of intuition over knowledge because of their free spirited personality and because of their wording. Even one of the actor’s claims that they found out that water repellant shoes would cause them to run on water by accident. Moreover the actors constantly talk about having belief in oneself, persistence, and confidence in order to walk on water. One of the actors even quotes its “Me my boots and I, were gonna make it”. This not only plants the romantic ideology of individual over society, but also builds the emotion of determination into the audience.

The video follows a very romantic ideology. It constantly plants feelings and emotions to get its point across. Mainly it demonstrates the following romantic ideological thoughts to develop enough emotion in the video to get one to buy Hi tech water proof shoes: emotion over reason, individual over society, rural over urban, nature over civilization, and mysticism.

In all, although this advertisement’s main political position was made to promote Hi tech water proof shoes, it also promotes the similar ideology of what the romantic in action would promote. Thus many of the same beliefs that occurred in the romantic era after the age of enlightenment were used in this video to create emotion in the video. Overall, the advertisement was very successful and is able to leave the audience filled with emotion and wanting more.