blog 4- Visual Cues

Since November is drawing ever closer, we see more and more commercials of both of the nominees telling us who we should vote for in the presidential elections. There is a lot that you have to pay attention to when you watch them. Sure they have their messages stating their reasons for why they should be president, but there is also visual information that might also be catching your interest. All of these visual cues play a part in the commercial; these visual cues are what I am going to try and interpret in my own words.

As I have been watching these commercials, admittedly they are mostly Barack Obama’s commercials; I have noticed that when they are talking about John McCain’s plans for the country, the lighting gets darker, and the speaker’s voice gets angrier sounding. This is something that will try and get you feeling as they do about senator McCain. They want you to feel that McCain is not the right person for presidency and they want you to feel upset by the thought that a man like McCain would even run for office. Another thing that they do is also show pictures of Senator McCain and President Bush hugging, shaking hands, and/or laughing together. This is trying to instill the thoughts that McCain is just like president Bush. When they show these pictures they usually have white writing across the picture to make the writing stand out. These words are usually about how we don’t want the same thing as President Bush, and how senator Obama would help change this. There was one commercial that did get my attention the most. If you go to barackobama.com and hit the media button; you will see a list of other media related things to the far right. The one that I clicked on was the button for ads. There is one that was really sweet that I liked; it didn’t really state too much about McCain, but it did talk about his family some more. The ad’s title was called “Buster” and it was talking about how his grandfather fought in General Patton’s army, his grandmother worked on a bomber assembly line and how his mother woke him up at 4:30 every morning to go over his lesson with him. It showed pictures of each of them doing something similar to this. He also stated that his grandfather told him that “we are Americans. We can do anything if we put our minds to it.” All of this is trying to show that he is from this country; that he isn’t a terrorist as some people accuse him of; his grandparents and his mother were white middle-class Americans; and that he lived an ordinary American boyhood. All of this is trying to convince the people watching that he is like you and me. Personally I think that the commercials are beautifully done because they do kind of suck you in by their facts, which they do have, and then an uplifting message at the end. It’s like when you have a stressful day at work. everything seems to be going wrong, you’re in a horrible mood and nothing seems to be making it better; then at the end of the day, you get home, see your family, and you know that everything is going to be alright. That is an uplifting feeling, and that is the feeling that he tries to leave with you at the end of his commercials. He is trying to say that he is going to make everything alright. You get this from how the light changes and the sound changes. Everything brightens up when he is on the screen and when he is talking. After watching a lot of Obama commercials this week, these are the visual cues and subtlety that I have seen.

P.S. Vote for Barack Obama Nov. 4th.