The advert I've chosen is an advert to promote the behaviour of adults and their children. It was part of an Australian campaign called Child Friendly and the aim of it was to make parents aware of their actions and how it can affect their children. The advert style is emotional but also shocking as the children behave appallingly, but only because they are copying what their parents are doing. The target audience would be parents or carers of children as they will realise that their children look up to them. If they see their parents doing something then they are likely to imitate them as they believe it is the right thing to do. I believe that an advert like this is purposely made to provoke an emotional response. In the advert we see at the beginning the children copying their parents. The parents in the video are doing things that are unsafe and irresponsible. For example we see a man walking across the road on the phone, not paying attention to anything that might be coming, then behind him we see his son doing the exact same thing. As the advert progresses we see the actions become worse, we start to see abuse of a partner in a kitchen and a woman shouting at her baby, and right beside them, their children are doing the same thing. This emphasises how children think and act, they do what their parents do. It's emotional to watch because the adults know better but the children don't, they're just copying their role models. There are a lot of persuasive devices in the advert such as fear and guilt. Some parents/carers watching it may be able to relate to it if they do things such as smoke, and watching it may lead them to feel guilty as they may feel they've had a bad influence on their child/children, creating emotion within the audience. This helps the aim of the advert as they then become more aware of their actions. Then at the end we see a man helping a woman pick up her shopping, and his son is copying him, stating that if you do good things and behave correctly, your child will do also.
The positioning of the camera throughout the advert is very important to. We have a lot of long shots of the child and parent to show the whole picture, letting us see the whole situation. There are also a few close up shots that show the anger and emotion of the characters in the advert, an example is when the woman and the child are going up the escalator and the camera cuts to a close up of a cigarette in the child's hand.This is a powerful image as it is horrible to think that a child of that age should be involved with something like that. The way the camera is positioned is important as it emphasises power. For example when we see the man shouting and abusing his wife, we are shown a point of view shot of the woman which emphasises the power of the man, and in this case the son also.
Thoughtful analysis - well done.
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