Television Editing Project

“The Lies the Commercials Told Me”

T.V. Editing Project

By Charles N. and Amy S.

 

            Given a mess of television footage and random commercials Charles and I had a somewhat difficult time determining how to edit the footage to make meaning out of it. Besides a bunch of college promotional videos and beauty advertisements there was a murder mystery show. We decided to focus on the beauty product commercials and create a message that television dictates how we are supposed to look and feel.

            The commercials for community colleges came in handy as filler before and after the beauty commercials. At the beginning we edited one of these college promos followed by a makeup advertisement. Putting the two together it was blatantly noticeable that the college student was average and simple compared to the glamour of the makeup models. We changed the coloring of the college promo to black and white at the end and put the title “NOT” to contradict what the college student was trying to say.

            Weight loss is another issue, next to beauty, that American television is obsessed with; every day we see at least one weight loss commercial. Charles and I ran across one commercial like this and another that completely contradicts healthy eating. Our next editing scheme was to put the weight loss commercial and an IHOP promo together. Inter-cutting the two makes a clear message that the morals of television are all over the board. Here is one commercial telling people (mostly women) that weight loss is easy and then there’s another telling America to come eat American pancakes and “come hungry, leave happy”. Personally when I see a commercial advertising fattening food the though that comes to my mind is weight gain. So we took the happiness out of the pancake commercial and expressed through titles exactly what some people feel when they do go to places like IHOP.

            One trait of the commercials that was noticeable was that they were for the most part targeted toward women. The animated model in the weight loss commercial was a woman; the pretty makeup models were of course all women with the exception of one guy thrown in. Even the college advertisements models were mostly women, except they were average looking people. It’s just a funny idea to me that television tells us to get a career, loose weight, eat pancakes and wear “wrinkle free” makeup all at the same time.