Monday 21 December 2015

Public Information Video/Research

After having watched every video of the 29 listed of the UK government's Central Office of information I decided to analyse "Smoker of the future". To do so I will analyse the message, key facts, tone of voice and audience.

A horrendous human without any kind of limitations or discipline reflects the result of ignoring bad habits. The message itself is to stop smoking or it would even affect the way humans evolve based on biological adaptations. The message of this video is delivered through a window that allows the audience to see a dystopian future: where the humanity is heading to if smoking becomes something intrinsecal to the human being.

One of the key facts is that the man is lying on a comfortable chair, in a future where machines do everything for humans. Humanity has become useless, and ugly. This ugliness is firstly spotted when the silhouette shows a huge nose, letting know the audience that something wrong is happening. 

With the intensity of a dark melody, the images create expectation. Also the expression of the actor is arrogant, which matches with the general idea of the stubborn smoker. The narrator presents it as something creepy and kind of scary. A person one wouldn't want to look like. But at the end, there is a bit of sarcasm after mentioning all the positive aspects of this futuristic person capable of smoking without getting any disease. This is when the narrator says: "Unfortunately, the first natural born smoker has never been born". This has to main ways to be interpreted: by smokers or non-smokers. Non-smokers would be simply scared and disgusted by the image of that person. Smokers would see their wishes of avoiding diseases and uncomfortable facts of smoking become reality, but not in the way they expected, scaring them from smoking.

The audience of this advert is probably young, between 18 and 30, as science fiction in 1985, the date of this advert, had quite strong influence on the young population. Also, older people normally were religious, so they wouldn't believe in such thing as evolution. That was something more contemporary and showing images of it had more impact to those who believed in evolution.

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