I have already written here about incomplete courses and acquired knowledge that always ends up being useful in our professional lives in some way. Today I decided to bring up a topic more related to my years in advertising, working as an Art Director.
When I think about creative work as Art Direction, I usually consider the visual layer. A design style, influence, reference, current trend, and sensitivity are needed to convey the desired feeling through the chosen visual language. However, I like to think that creative work can manifest itself in other ways, and I wanted to extrapolate this thought a little. Please follow me.
I see references. Everywhere.
References are a topic that our teachers often talk about when we are in college, inviting us to explore new horizons. Theatres, movies, songs, architecture, everything is a reference. Brazilian soap operas, for example, have their own language, and understanding these characteristics is important if you want to use it as a trick for your advertising work, regardless of whether you liked Avenida Brasil or not. To try to illustrate what I am saying, let’s use some examples.
Avengers, the Age of Ultron
Here we have the trailer for the film, which features a tense soundtrack that becomes more evident as the trailer progresses. To help you understand the connections and references, in the film, the Avengers face a challenge: a villain created from an experiment that combines a type of alien artificial intelligence with Jarvis (Tony Stark’s OS).
Following the plot already known since Terminator, the intelligent system rebels after identifying that humanity is the problem, and after evolving its own capabilities, it manages to get out of control and gain a life of its own, even creating its own body. The soundtrack that grows throughout the trailer is a tense and almost macabre version of the cute song from our childhood, “I’ve got no strings”, from Pinocchio.
In the movie the reference is obvious, given that Ultron sings the original version, almost mocking the fact that he is now free, but in the trailer it is subtle, and it is in this subtlety that the beauty lies. In the trailer the most unaware may not understand that the term is the Pinocchio song, which becomes more obvious at 1’53”, when the phrase “There are no strings on me” is said.
Here we have an almost nostalgic strategy, using an old and well-known musical reference, transformed with a sad/thriller/threatened layer, and that at the end of the day, is connected with the plot of the movie, but that is not that obvious.
The Inception
This on is not about using the references of something else, but as we can bring available resources to the limit to explain a concept.
The Chris Nolan’s movie Inception uses its soundtrack and sound effects as an amazing feature to create the “dream into a dream” aspect. Just to add a little context, the film is about a group of specialized thieves who put their victims to sleep and create a universe within their dreams, where they invade their dreams and can steal important information, with scenarios where there are dreams in dreams .
Based on the context that time goes on faster in our dreams, they use these sound effects to symbolize it. So while a song played in the “real world” is normally reproduced, when heard from the dream perspective, it is more slowly reproduced and with a lower pitch.
At a given moment in the movie, this concept is used to the extreme, so that music is slow, with very low sounds, becoming almost scary, but in practice, is nothing more than the music Edith Piaf – Non, Je Nelettte Rien , which is playing in the “real world”. If you have not watched the movie yet, it is the tip. Watching knowing these details makes the movie more interesting.
Brastemp – Bonus
Using a similar approach but with a different strategy, Brastemp used its famous Brazilian sound signature, famous in the 90s, as inspiration for the soundtrack of this campaign.
So if I could share some advice here, it would be: keep consuming and collecting multicultural references. You don’t know how useful it can be to have the challenge of creating a new advertising campaign and realizing for example, that all vehicles on your child’s TV shows can be helpful.