Video Essay

         After taking the class and Professor Juhasz’s advice that I narrow down my proposal and only focus on one of my three proposed topics, I began to construct a project that focused only on how people interact with and what they think of outdoor advertising via billboards.  Specifically I planned to focus on how consumerism effects our relationship to billboards in that in order to see a billboard one must look up at it (the product is always looming down on us) and how seeing the full billboard is difficult because people are constantly driving quickly by, yet commercialism is still an inherent part of our daily lives.  What I noticed from the photos of billboards that I collected was that the words and pictures strategically placed on billboards each worked in different ways to create emotions in a consumer.  However although looking at only words or only pictures was interesting, I realized that no matter if the billboard was for food, a public service announcement, using a provocative model to sell clothes, or a political campaign, the main purpose of all of these billboards was to provide enough information so that a person feels good and buys something.

         After spending a day going out and taking photos of billboards I realized that having this come across in my video essay was quite boring and not very impactful so I found myself questioning how I could make my project more interesting. Going out a second day, this time driving down Sunset Blvd I was deeply affected by just how many billboards there were. There were billboards on the street, in front of people’s homes, on the freeway, on the side of buildings, shopping malls, etc. all pressuring people to buy a specific product.  I began to think about contrasting the many ways people positively interact with billboards (my friends in my interviews stated that they help them decide what to buy, that they like to support a company selling a certain product that they live, and how they just like looking at the pictures) with visual pollution and the anti-billboard movement, including culture jammers who believe that the commercialization of advertising is polluting our thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors.  The point of this video essay is not to say billboards or good or bad, but to present the many ways people interact with billboards and question why, how, and if billboards could possibly be polluting our world. If the answer is yes, then is commercialization via billboards polluting our thoughts and mannerisms, or is it merely the notion that they are just physically polluting our space.

         I started my video essay by taking the perspective of a driver who while driving around Los Angels comes into contact with many different billboard advertisements.  After defining the benefits of advertising through a mainstream media channel (a voice over from Mad Men) that explains how advertising makes you “happy,” I turned to three of my friends who I interviewed.  They explain how billboards effect the way they see the world though both its visuals and words. To offer an opposing view of advertising on billboards, I then explored how culture jammers have used distorted versions of billboards to highlight the spectacle of consumerism and its effects on our physical environment and interactions with products and one another.

         I thought this overall experience of “writing” an essay through visual means was very interesting and opened my mind up to expressing myself through new and creative visual forms. While I of course ran into issues (on Tuesday night IMovie crashed and I had a panic attack while running to the apple store to have them fix my laptop) I overall felt a much more personal connection to my subject then if I was doing research and writing a 10 page paper.  I enjoyed going out and interacting with my topic by physically being in the presence of billboards and using the camera to look at it pierce by piece (through words, visuals, interviews) in a way that I could have never interacted with in a traditional academic assignment.