Week 6 - Writing Exercise

Activity 2.4

I struggle to escape the Proactive commercials on television. Each commercial is about a minute and a half too long for the impatient and short-attention spans of television users. Still, I think that the Proactive commercials are a good example of a narrative commercial.

Now, most of the Proactive commercials begin with a celebrity endorser, who will tell their story. Recently, dancer Julianne Hough has taken the reigns at Proactive. She explains her struggle to have clear skin (with a image of her dancing playing the background). This sets the scene of the story. A beautiful dancer struggling to look great as she performs.

As the commercial progresses, more characters are introduced and their brief stories are told though before and after pictures. Each character struggling to maintain clear skin and how wonderful the product has been for them.

Cue a scientific description of the product, telling the “doctor” approved side of the story.

All to end back on the Julianne character and the success she has found with proactive. A perfect story told in the span of three minutes.





Activity 2.6

In animation artists control the pace of the narrative. Detailed animation can lead to more realistic, faster pace narratives. Minimalistic narratives can serve to drag out an animated piece.

In South Park, the characters are reacting to popular culture events in exaggerated and often unbelievable circumstances. Audiences follow the characters week to week and begin to laugh along with the parallels between South Park’s imagined world and the world today. I feel as if shows like South Park, The Simpsons, and Family Guy offer escapism from our everyday life. The characters are often family oriented and relevant to our own lives, yet treat situations in ways that are seen as strange or implausible.

The Incredibles may have been marketed showing off the famous voice actors, but for me the voice behind each character was irrelevant. Familiar voices do nothing for me in animation, I treat each character as distinct and oftentimes the familiarity of a voice dissipates within minutes of a movie or show. The Incredibles is a successful movie with insane detail. Each character is an exaggerated silhouette of an everyday person. The father’s facial features are similar to a human but he has a large chin, huge torso and small legs giving him a grandeur persona of a “macho man.” By stretching out or elongating even the smallest of things in an animation can change a viewers entire interpretation of a piece in a way that is impossible to do with live action movies (unless the budget allows for insane amounts of makeup and CGI).