This video was posted by @nike on Instagram on July 31, 2020.
The title of the video is #YouCantStopUs.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CDRPM5PJGY7/
Provide some context on the video by summarising the content, the context of publication, and the audience it targets.
This video is the latest advertising video released by Nike on Instagram. In this video, there are images of many athletes wearing Nike products fighting on the sports field. The main target audience of this video is people who love sport, and attract customers to buy their sports products by showing the passionate images of athletes. By combining current events, the video content expresses to customers that we could spend this challenging time together.
How was the video made technically?
In the video, two different moving pictures are spliced into one complete picture. The video picture is divided into two parts, but the athlete’s body in the image moves perfectly into a complete coherent movement when moving between storyboards. The video editing is creative. It is not easy to ensure that the size of the object in the picture is the same every time, and it is also necessary to stitch two pictures into a complete scene. This advertisement quickly attracted my attention through athletes wearing their products, coupled with exciting background music and commentary.
This video uses many scenes of athletes wearing Nike products running in the sports field. By looking for two images with the same action, and then adjusting the size and angle of the characters in the video, the images of two different people in different scenes are perfectly combined.
What similarities and differences can you make with other forms of time-based media?
By reading interview articles of CAITLIN DOVER and Guggenheim (2014), I learned that time-based media is a media art that develops over time according to the time logic of media playback, such as video, film, and audio. This Nike video allows viewers to feel the use of richer media materials by combining audio and video.
Compared with broadcast, this video has more rich pictures, giving viewers a sharper visual and auditory dual experience. Broadcasting can only use audio, it may be lacking on the visual level, but broadcasting has more vibrant audio than other time-based media products. Nike’s ad on Instagram has completely different frame ratios from traditional movies. Nike’s ad uses a 1:1 video aspect ratio, which is more in line with the aspect ratio style that people are used to on Instagram. The 16:9 large format of the movie can show more content on the screen. In terms of duration, the duration of a movie is usually much longer than that of an advertisement. The purpose of the advertisement is to let the audience feel the charm of the product in the shortest possible time.
What is innovative about this video? Articulate what makes it different from other examples of video practice you have seen on Instagram.
After watching and researching this video, I learned more creativity and skills in video editing aspect. The editing method of this advertisement gave me a lot of inspiration, and it also taught me that advertisements could also be exciting and show superb editing techniques.
This video shows a large number of images of different athletes in just one minute. Moreover, through unusual editing methods, it is easy to attract the attention of the customers. Most of the other sports advertisements I have seen on Instagram always focus on promoting products, and using a huge part of video content to introducing and displaying product performance. This Nike’s advertisement is more natural to impress customers by conveying the concept of the product.
Reference:
Caitlin Dover, 2014, ‘What Is “Time-Based Media”?: A Q&A with Guggenheim Conservator Joanna Phillips’, viewed 05 August 2020, <https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/what-is-time-based-media-a-q-and-a-with-guggenheim-conservator-joanna-phillips>.