Thank you for this wonderful comment! Very glad the military connection and the educational ad clips worked for you; I was worried that the Army ad juxtaposition in particular felt heavy-handed and didactic and obvious, but perhaps that was just the "you've been too close to the materials for too long" distortion in my head. And I figured and hoped that some large subset of the viewers would have a moment a bit like yours, "oh I had forgotten that till this moment!" I'm delighted that this happened for you!
I'm really curious what led you to decide to make this.
Thank you for asking! Sometimes, to relax, my spouse and I watch old TV ads, and so I already had a bunch of compilations downloaded. Just after I finished "Created By Man," I thought it might be fun to make a vid highlighting the vintage fashion and hair you see in these vintage ads. I started clipping for that but got sort of distracted by the ads for phones and other electronics stuff.
A friend of mine is a fan of VNV Nation and had pointed me to the music video for "When Is The Future", which has this urban restless yearning melancholy relentless-forward-motion quality. I tried slapping that down on the timeline and noticed that, with a very little editing, I could fit most of that calculator watch ad into that first wordless minute, and then there was a "Reach Out and Touch Someone" ad that -- on its own -- fit the first chunk of lyrics pretty well.
At first I was going to try to just do that -- to just slap some existing commercials down, practically in their entirety. I thought, maybe this will be a quick, easy, only kinda-messy vid, with some nostalgia and some point-and-laugh value. But that approach stopped working as well after that first phone ad. And, as you noticed, I found bonkers stuff and wanted to pluck it out and show it to y'all. The multiple cop-type board games where you use some electronic gadget instead of a card deck or something! Feature 21 .... the price! Personal computers literally on pedestals! ITT Technical Institute showing you a Dali-esque painting about electronics!
And as I did some more work on it I found I wanted to kind of draw out how .... how we have some very fancy computer games and phones now, and we do very complicated things with them, but also we make the equivalent of Teddy Ruxpin and billiards games, and that kind of stuff is what most people want and use? And kind of a nod to Tressie McMillan Cottom's Lower Ed in a way, in the tiny bits stitched in there on the for-profit colleges and the military recruitment.
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branchandroot
some making-of thoughts
Date: 2020-12-28 05:03 pm (UTC)Thank you for asking! Sometimes, to relax, my spouse and I watch old TV ads, and so I already had a bunch of compilations downloaded. Just after I finished "Created By Man," I thought it might be fun to make a vid highlighting the vintage fashion and hair you see in these vintage ads. I started clipping for that but got sort of distracted by the ads for phones and other electronics stuff.
A friend of mine is a fan of VNV Nation and had pointed me to the music video for "When Is The Future", which has this urban restless yearning melancholy relentless-forward-motion quality. I tried slapping that down on the timeline and noticed that, with a very little editing, I could fit most of that calculator watch ad into that first wordless minute, and then there was a "Reach Out and Touch Someone" ad that -- on its own -- fit the first chunk of lyrics pretty well.
At first I was going to try to just do that -- to just slap some existing commercials down, practically in their entirety. I thought, maybe this will be a quick, easy, only kinda-messy vid, with some nostalgia and some point-and-laugh value. But that approach stopped working as well after that first phone ad. And, as you noticed, I found bonkers stuff and wanted to pluck it out and show it to y'all. The multiple cop-type board games where you use some electronic gadget instead of a card deck or something! Feature 21 .... the price! Personal computers literally on pedestals! ITT Technical Institute showing you a Dali-esque painting about electronics!
And as I did some more work on it I found I wanted to kind of draw out how .... how we have some very fancy computer games and phones now, and we do very complicated things with them, but also we make the equivalent of Teddy Ruxpin and billiards games, and that kind of stuff is what most people want and use? And kind of a nod to Tressie McMillan Cottom's Lower Ed in a way, in the tiny bits stitched in there on the for-profit colleges and the military recruitment.