Thriller presentation

Thrillers from Adam Picton and CJ Lewis

Weekly news September 19th

Weekly news for week starting 19^th of September by Adam Picton.

Now my first weekly news, isn’t really a news story. There are many news stories about it, but I’d prefer to just go the source of it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPsn17_a8-g

This video stirred up a lot of controversy when it first hit light sometime around last year. And while I know it’s satire, I wished it was real. It’d be magical to have people this stupid on earth. The woman in the video’s stage name is Cassidy Boon, and she is a journalist. She writes most of her articles as the character Cassidy Boon and stirs up controversy for attention. This is the most famous occurrence of this but it is certainly not the only one. After some further research on her, I also found out she’s written about Vegemite being racist, men can’t be raped and how Harley Quinn is too sexy in Suicide Squad. But back to the topic at hand.

To summarize, the story is just Cassidy Boon saying she nearly drowned and a man saved her, pulled her out of the water and resuscitated her. But she is now trying to sue him for rape. Obviously this is not real because Cassidy Boon is a character but I imagine that somewhere, there must be somebody who would think this way. Somebody must be crazy enough to honestly believe #saverape is a serious thing. Just watch the video for context. This got me thinking about other controversial people who do it for attention. Katie Hopkins is very much the same thing but on a larger scale and who knows if her opinions are really hers or not. I personally don’t mind it and while I think Katie Hopkins is a complete and utter (removed in post because I remembered this was homework), I also think people take most controversial writers too seriously. And some people even enjoy reading stuff like this. It’s like a great movie villain that you really hate, but you love to hate them. In conclusion, if people really want this kind of stuff to stop, then all they really need to do is not feed it, but they do because the people love drama and controversy and that’s never going to change.

This Girl Can VS Victoria's Secret

Starting with the “This Girl Can” advert, we’ll go through 3 basic things. What we see, who it’s for and why we see it. We open to a woman in a swimsuit walking from some locker rooms towards a swimming pool. This opening shot establishes that she just got changed to go swimming. This shot may not be for anybody in particular but it lets us know immediately she’s about to do some physical activity. We see this to establish the rest of the video which will include females doing similar physical activity.

The next shot I want to analyse is about 8 seconds in when a girl is putting a gum shield in, presumably in a boxing ring but she also has pink, feminine nails on and fake eye lashes and earrings. This is for girls who are worried that being sporty and physical might make them come across as less sexy, which is mainly 14-30 year old woman. We see this because when we think of boxing, we don’t usually associate it with make-up and cosmetics. The shot shows that just because a woman does boxing, doesn’t mean she can’t still be girly or feminine and doesn’t have to be manly. It’s encouraging to the target audience.

The final shot I want to analyse is the shot that says “sweating like a pig” at about 34 seconds in. We see loads of women dancing and doing exercise but as it says, they’re sweating profusely. However there’s a shot following this a couple of seconds later saying “feeling like a fox”. This is for women 14-30 who are again quite scared to seem like a “pig” because of how sweaty and unattractive they’ll be while exercising. The following shot reassures them that they’ll still be sexy and foxy despite sweating so much. We see this again, just to encourage us to exercise and do sport.

Onto the “Victoria’s Secret” advertisement. Rather than analysing a particular shot, I want to just wrap it up in one, because many of the shots are just the same. They’re pretty girls, all following the same body type, hair styles, features and expressions. They’re all being very passive, posing for photos, not really doing much. This is also for women 14-30 but not to encourage them to get active, just to buy their products. We see all these shots to tell us, you aren’t beautiful unless you look like these girls. They’re all beautiful and you don’t look like them so you can’t be. But if you buy our products, you will look like them. That’s pretty much the entire point of the advert so as you can see, despite being for the same audience, there’s nearly no correlations between their messages, being nearly completely opposite.

In conclusion, the This Girl Can video shows all women as powerful, sexy and independent, going out and being active. Meanwhile the Victoria’s Secret advert shows all beautiful women as sexy, dependent and passive and implies any other kind of women is not a woman at all and not beautiful.

60 second intro video