Week 7 Production and Outcomes

Today’s lecture was on “Production and Outcomes”, and first I’ll be looking at “Interpretation”, both on the part of the viewer and the artist. Controlling how a piece of work will be interpreted by the viewer is very important in visual communication, as you will always have a purpose that you are trying to achieve in the viewers mind. A big influence of this is the artist’s own interpretation of the work based on the culture of the time. This is known as Zeitgeist (literally, “spirit of the age”), and can be seen in many places if you look for it. An example of this can be seen in the portrayal of the “good” characters (particularly superheroes) in the 30’s 50’s, compared to now. In the past, heroes will always be purely good and never have any negative qualities, regardless of any kind of traumatic upbringing. Obviously these kind of characters still exist in places, but are not close to as widespread, whereas media now has much more variety (and perhaps more humanity) in the characters, ranging from brooding heroes to ruthless anti-heroes and even sympathetic villain-protagonists. There could be many cultural factors relating to this, and it is difficult to analyse a time period that you are living in, but it may be that with the birth of the information age with the world at our fingertips, we are now very much desensitized to the idea of death.

Compare Batman in the 40’s in which he will never, ever kill...

...To the 2000’s *spoiler alerts*, in which he has deliberately left his mentor to die and blown up a building full of people.

The second principle I’m looking at is delivery. Choosing the correct method of delivery is very important for communicating effectively, as failure to do so can cause your message to go unnoticed, or misunderstood. A very effective delivery of advertising is to give the audience subtle puzzles, so they have to work out the message. Working out the message intrigues the viewer and draws them in, and solving it makes them feel good and associate that feeling with the message or product. A good example of this form of delivery is a certain recruitment campaign by Google. They placed billboards (pictured below) with a complicated puzzle leading to a website with another puzzle, which led to more puzzles of increasing complexity until the dedicated problem-solver would be asked for their CV.

In case you cannot read it, the writing says "first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e"