Make
Life More than Just a Vision
My goal with this video was to demonstrate
and critique the cycle of consumerism. The video has seven parts with different
meanings to create the best understanding of the matter.
The first part is about work. It
starts out with cars just driving normally on a highway. I just looked for
YouTube videos which could solve that function. I did not pay attention to the
actual meaning and I just used them as a source for my video. Then I wanted to
show an actual driver who displays the first signs of frustration. I used parts
of the trailer of the movie Office Space.
It shows a man driving to work who is getting frustrated because of traffic.
This is supposed to appeal to many working people since most of them have to
drive to work and then back home again during rush hour. Still, from the
trailer I used a scene in which a man runs to work which I used as a transition
to the actual work place. I continued with a couple of office videos of people
working. I started out with just showing working environments of different
offices to then following up with more aggression to people destroying their
computers and completely losing control. Also for these videos I just used
YouTube videos which served my purpose. During these clips I blended in the
starting words of a quote from the movie Fight
Club “We work jobs we hate, to buy shit we don’t need”. I just used the
beginning of the quote “We work jobs” because the first part of video was about
jobs.
I used the middle part of the quote
“to buy” as a transition to TV commercials. I started out with a commercial
from IKEA. The music from this commercial was really calming and it displayed a
woman just waking up in a really comfortable-looking bed. This was a big
contrast to the end of my first part of the video, which was perfect because I
wanted to get the viewer in a “pissed-off mood” about jobs but then present
them the reason why they work. I cut this commercial half way and then went to
another IKEA commercial. This one was about a couple who wanted to buy furniture
for their new house. According to the video they wanted “a home where it feels
like everything is just designed for them”. Here I blended in my first critique
which was the answer of the statement I just mentioned “But really it’s
designed for everyone” because everyone can go to IKEA and buy it. I followed
up with the end of an AXE body spray commercial. I challenged the end slogan
which goes like this “Spray more, Get more – The AXE Effect” and added my own
version of the slogan which went like this “Work more, Buy More – The AXE
wealth increase Effect”. This is a criticism towards consumerism. AXE tells us
the more we “men” spray of their deodorant the more girls we get. That’s why I
changed it to work more because then you can buy more. I tracked back to my
second IKEA commercial and presented the end of this one. “We are IKEA The life
improvement store” is the commercial slogan for this one in the end and I
responded with “the sell your life away store”. IKEA claims to improve our life
but by buying into this statement we basically sell our life away because we will
buy into materialistic values. After this one, I displayed the 5 hour energy
commercial. This product is supposed to give us energy for all kinds of
different activities we do in our life and as said in the end “every day is a
5-hour energy day”. I restated it as “Every day they will make money off you”.
I did not even talk about all the health problems this product would most
likely give you if you really actually take it every day. I just concentrated
on the fact that apparently, to this company, we need their product every day
to live our life to the fullest potential and therefore we would owe them money
every day. In the end I wrapped this whole part up with the end of the first
IKEA commercial I presented. The woman in the bed wakes up and an IKEA employee
sits right next to her and she asks him “My dream bed is an IKEA?” and the IKEA
employee responds with a yes which I extended to a “Yes your dream is a product
of consumerism!”. I see this as the strongest statement and hope to wake up the
viewer to realize that consumerism already gets into our “dreams”. Our dreams
are simple products and this is why we work so hard every day.
Part three follows up with a part
from the move Fight Club with the
quote “I slip through catalogues to see what kind of dinning set defines me as
a person”. This statement is intended to wake up the viewer even more. Do we
really just define ourselves through products? I switch over to the quote from Fight Club which I stated earlier in the
first part of my video. “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothe. We work
jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need.” I used this speech of character “Tyler
Durden” to finish the quote and get the message across.
In part four, I displayed many
different labels of our most famous companies which rule our world. First I
planned to just go to different websites of all these companies to create this
part of the video, but then I thought about looking at YouTube. I found a video
which had a part I could cut out and put my own music in the background to make
it fit into my video. While seeing all these symbols, I realized that I almost
recognized all of them. Most of these symbols are burned into our heads through
advertisement and they rule, or better said own our lives. I used the song
“Sail” by Awolnation throughout my whole video because this song presents a
desperate mood and fits my critique really well. Throughout showing all the
symbols, I played the song again. After the clip of all the symbols were over,
the lyrics of the song said “cry for help” and “kill myself”. I used these
words and displayed them on the screen to extend the desperate atmosphere. I
hope to have achieved in the viewer throughout my video the realization that we
know we live in a free country but our lives are really not owned by us anymore
furthermore; they are owned by companies.
For part five, I used the depressive
atmosphere I created throughout the video to introduce another statement right
after I presented “kill myself” as the last statement of part four. I presented
an answer “No! Consumerism has an answer for you.” and used this as a
transition for blending in a commercial for an antidepressant pill. A quote
from the commercial said “Bipolar depression does not just affect you. It can
consume you” and I questioned this with “Isn’t ‘It’ just our life? Our Jobs?
Our Products?” I challenged the phrase “bipolar depression” to be a feeling
which we have because of our life. People feel like the actors in these
commercials because they might be about to realize what kind of life they live
in our consumer society, but then the industry presents a pill as a solution by
drugging them and even getting money out of them while doing this.
In part six I showed a realted cut from
the movie Fight Club again in which
Tyler Durden talks about consumerism and highlighted especially one sentence
here which is, “Things you own,” which are all our products we are so proud of
mostly just in the beginning “end up owning you.” And this is the part why we
are getting consumed ourselves by all these companies.
Since I used most of my quotes from
the movie Fight Club I wanted to
include one creative part of my own too. I summed up the whole situation in a
poem for part seven of my video:
“"Are
you getting in the cycle of consumption?
To
lose your complete freedom of function?
Will
you help our companies keep booming?
Product
over Product, what you will keep consuming?
But
the answer is not another pill.
Because
you alone have the will.
And
you alone can make a decision.
And
make life more than just a vision."
I
presented all my sources and then ended the video with one short quote “It’s
only after we lost everything that we are free to do anything” from the movie Fight Club.
