0:00
The scene opens with a front shot of 3 people in a car, with one person in the back seat, one in the passenger and one in the driver seat. The woman in the driver’s seat is painting her nails on top of the wheel, the woman in the passenger seat is curling her hair with heatless curlers, and the man in the backseat is putting lotion on his face. The dashboard has nail polish bottles, towels and curlers on it creating a messy and cluttered environment, something not suitable for driving. No person is paying attention to the road, the most important to note being the driver, who is focused on painting her nails. The activities taking place are in no way something safe to be doing while driving in a fast moving car.
0:02
A close up on the driver painting her nails as she dips the nail brush into the open bottle. Her eyes are on her nails and not on the road in front of her. From the reflection of the window we can tell that the car is moving, but it is not moving very fast. The words “Don’t Spa and Drive” come up at the bottom of the screen. This refers to the well known phrase: “Don’t Text and Drive,” telling the audience that you shouldn’t be doing anything other than driving when you are on the road.
0:04
A close up on the passenger in the front putting curlers in her hair. Her eyes are on the rear-view mirror above her as she continues using the curlers. The passenger in the back seat is putting on face lotion, looking up towards the top of the car, again not looking at the road in front. The car is still moving, and the “Don’t Spa and Drive” are still on the screen. This is more emphasis that no one in the car is paying attention to the road.
0:06
A new scene starts with a side view of a different man in the driver’s seat using some sort of pulley weight lifting method in the car. From the side view, we see the trees going past to show that the car is moving at a decent speed. Neither of his hands are on the wheel and his focus is down, clearly he is distracted and not paying attention to the road, he isn’t even steering. His face is scrunched, portraying a deep concentration on his task, but not the right task when in the driver’s seat.
0:07
A front view of the same man lifting a weight, his face is concentrated and has some sweat dripping. There are boxing gloves on the dashboard, and the back seat is very crowded with other workout equipment, the car is filled with random things. The man continues lifting the weight and the words “Don’t Lift and Drive” come up on the bottom of the screen, another reference to the phrase “Don’t Text and Drive.”
0:09
A closer front view on the driver as he continues to lift the weight. His focus is completely off the road, and is looking down. His face shows lots of concentration, but it is for the weight lifting still, not the driving. “Don’t Lift and Drive” is still displayed on the bottom of the screen.
0:11
A new scene starts with a front view of the car, a man is in the driver’s seat and a woman is in the passenger seat. Both people are wearing baking hats and white coats. There is a wooden spoon and flour all over the dashboard, showing a very messy environment. This backseat is different, with just a display of cupcakes in the middle seat. This can represent something fragile, one wrong move by the driver and it could fall over and get destroyed. In a situation where the driver has a child in the backseat and is not paying attention to the road, one wrong move could cause the child to become really hurt. The driver has frosting smeared on his face and is carefully frosting a cupcake, his full focus on the cupcake with no hands on the wheel. The woman has a giant bowl with batter in her hands and is mixing it with a whisk. The trees are going by in the background behind the car, showing the car in fast motion.
0:13
A close up on the driver who is putting red sprinkles onto the cupcake now. Once again adding another layer to the distractive activities he is indulging in. His full attention is on the cupcake. The reflection of the trees in the windshield are still moving at a decent pace, showing the car is still moving. The words “Don’t Bake and Drive” appear on the bottom of the screen. The frosting on the cupcake starts to fall off, causing the driver to become very surprised and even more focused on the frosting that is falling, but he keeps shaking sprinkles onto the cupcake.
0:15
A new scene starts with the front view of the car, with a woman just barely getting into the car as we see the door just close. She takes the seat belt and buckles it. The background of trees and a brick building is seen still, showing the car is parked instead of moving this time.
0:17
A close up of the driver pulling up her phone, with her full attention on the phone. The words “Don’t Text and Drive” come up at the bottom of the screen. After looking at her phone for a few seconds, she shakes her head and puts the phone down and both of her hands on the steering wheel. The car has not moved yet, showing that she is prepared and paying attention even when in park. She moves around in her seat and puts both of her eyes on the road in front of her, showing that she is not going to text and drive but keep both her eyes and hands on the wheel.
If you want to rise to the top of the Feedback Please queue, LittleCow, drop me a specific Reply here describing the sort of feedback that would help you the most. Is it your Argument, your Sources, your Research technique, your Logic, your Rhetoric, your Organization, your Grammar, or something else that you’d prefer to have help with?
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Hello! I would love to have feedback on my rhetoric and organization. It would be super helpful for me to make sure my rewrite is the best it can be!
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Good to hear, LC.
On this assignment, Organization is a simple matter of making sure that in every timed section you blend visual details with an analysis of why the director/filmmaker chose to include such details to persuade us of a particular point of view: Visual/Rhetoric.
Permit me to demonstrate how I see the first two seconds of the video. It’s one I’ve never viewed, and I have no idea how it will turn out. I’m watching without the sound.
0:00-0:01
The video begins with a scene of 3 people in a car from the Point-of-View of someone sitting on the hood. The camera moves along with the car, so it gets no closer to us in the first second, but we can tell it’s in motion from the reflections on the windshield and the views of moving trees and highway details through the rear and side windows. This is a common view from hundreds of movies and TV shows. We know from all those experiences that the “driver” is never “driving” in these scenes. The car is being pulled along a highway, and the “driver” isn’t steering even if she is turning the wheel.
In this case that distinction really matters because the woman in the driver’s seat is paying ZERO attention to the road ahead. In fact, no one in the car is paying any attention to the direction of travel. The driver is painting her nails, looking directly at her right hand as she applies pink polish with her left hand from an open polish bottle on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel. In fact, her hand is resting on the wheel, so that if she moves it to facilitate the polishing, she might accidentally steer the car into danger.
The other two occupants of the car are both similarly engaged in self-care and primping activities. A woman in the passenger’s seat is setting her hair in rollers, and a man in the back seat, a blue turban around his head, is apparently applying lotion to his cheek. Whatever the point of their individual activities, not one of them is attending to the road. In the first second we see the driver looking closely at her nails, the passenger apparently using the side-view mirror to help guide her hair into the rollers, and the back-seat passenger, head turned and eyes closed, deliberately looking at nothing at all. The point of the scene, delivered in the first second, is that these actors are all behaving in ways that would not be dangerous somewhere else but which are extremely hazardous while traveling in a moving car on a highway.
The dashboard is cluttered with hair rollers and at least half a dozen nail polishes and other cosmetic items, plus a litter of brushes and sponge applicators, as if the scene were a makeover site instead of a moving car. These characters are dangerously out of place and as a result they’re in immediate danger of a catastrophe.
So.
If I did that well, you’ll recognize the fluid nature of the blended observations. You provide enough visual detail for viewers to imagine the scene in their mind’s eye while at the same time suggesting how they would interpret the scene if they were watching it.
Is that helpful?
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