New Vid: "Electric Silhouettes"

[brainwane]

In sort of the same mode as "Created By Man" late last year: here's a new vid about weird motifs in 1980s US television ads.

Title: Electric Silhouettes
Vidder: Sumana Harihareswara ("brainwane")
Fandom: 1980s US television commercials (with a bit of the 1990s)
Music: VNV Nation, "When Is The Future"
Length: 5min8sec
Summary: Phones, gadgets, handheld games, executives, the military, and how we thought about them.
Content notes: The US military (a control room), Teddy Ruxpin and children looking hypnotized, brief clips with trippy visual effects, an injured person being bandaged (no blood or injury is visible)
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA)
Download or Stream: on Google Drive (84 megabytes for an MP4 file; a .srt subtitles file is there too); also available at Critical Commons with login (high- and low-res VP9 and H.264 files)
Tools: kdenlive, youtube-dl, GNOME Subtitles, Krita, emacs
Subtitles file: see the Download/Stream section


This vid reflects a bit on the mix of moods, images, themes, and assumptions in US television ads for consumer electronics in the 1980s (mostly -- a tiny bit of the 90s too). If nothing else, I hope you'll watch the first minute and laugh with me about "Feature 21" of that calculator watch. This is a very static-y and low-res vid because the source material I'm using is, generally, VCR capture that folks uploaded to YouTube. And folks should tell me if they need to know which specific products were being advertised, the dates of broadcast, etc.

Lyrics websites tell me that the song has a line "The image we create / Now image we designed" but I hear it as (and have subtitled it as) "The image we create / In our image we designed" which is far more grammatical and makes more thematic sense.

This vid is under CC BY-SA and I hope people feel free to remix it, redistribute it, and otherwise enjoy it, as long as they attribute me as the vidder.

Thanks to my spouse Leonard for beta viewing and to and my friend Zed Lopez for encouragement!

Comments

[thingswithwings]

ok this was hilarious and a little creepy and an absolute BLAST. I can't get over that montage of telephone use where the WHOLE FAMILY wants to crowd around and pretend to listen to the call! And all the children so constantly shocked and delighted by everything! The song choice is perfect and you focused so lovingly on all the most bonkers stuff. I also really liked the connections you made between the image of the future in advertising and stuff like degrees in "technology" (I remember those commercials!) and the military.

Gotta say that that Jurassic Park game forcibly time-traveled my soul backwards into my body as a kid. I didn't have that one, but I had a bunch of handheld games that used that exact technology and I had forgotten it until this moment.

What a delight! I'm really curious what led you to decide to make this.

some making-of thoughts

[brainwane]

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.