Super. Human. Tokyo 2020-media language, representation & audiences

The aim of charity

-those designed to raise awareness of issues and events, is to have an immediate impact upon the audience to make them take notice; therefore, these advertisements need to be more memorable and hard-hitting.

narrative of the advert

-follows the lives of the Paralympians and their battles through training. The sequence where the athlete is trying to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to his daughter on a mobile phone whilst training on a bike reinforces the clash between the sport and the family

Semiotics – Roland Barthes

-advertisements have to communicate meaning rapidly, they use recognisable codes and conventions that signify messages for audiences to decode

Structuralism – Claude Lévi-Strauss

-The images of gruelling training regimes are contrasted with the celebratory images at the end of the advertisement when success is achieved.

-‘To be a Paralympian there’s got to be something wrong with you’ creates a conceptual binary opposition between audience perception of Paralympic athletes and the reality

Groups may be under-represented or misrepresented.

-Dominant groups in society largely control what is produced and as a result, minority groups tend to be marginalised, creating an unrealistic view of the contemporary world

-advertisement attempts to address the marginalisation of certain social groups