FILM | Cargasm Breakdown #1

Deconstructing 'Cargasm' TVC

    Filmmaking is a complex process to begin with, and the amount of cogs and gears to make everything run doesn’t make it easier for me to break it down concisely. They say the simplest explanation is the best, and it takes a genius to do so. I agree but I would argue that the sentiment drags me down like a heavy metal coil shackled through my feet. The responsibility had me on a vicious cycle of rewrites. Dwelling on unsophistication will never get any job done. It’s also a sign of my obliviousness to my target readers. So I have settled on a selfish approach. And I will deconstruct my process in creating an award-winning television commercial as a director in accordance with the three stages of film production.

    May this article serve you well.

Building Your Vision

    I stare blankly to an indefinite point on the whiteboard. The room temperature sank, and the dust particles between the beams of the video projector began to stagnate, then froze. And like that time grinds to a halt.

    It’s amazing what you can accomplish with words. A certain permutation can enrich your scene with more emotions. It was a conscious decision to ‘paint’ my absent-mindedness in class, in place of merely telling it so. As for cinema the principle of show-don’t-tell still applies, but due to the inherently visual nature of the medium, it operates on a different grammatical structure. As the captain of the ship, I find this direction truthful to my vision of the project.

    The theme of the festival (Sexual Fantasy & Harassment) works best in tandem with a Marxist approach. But what does HE have to do with anything? I’m just as surprised by how much his ideas influenced everything that succeeded him. Marxism says that cinema is one means of perpetuating ideology. The set of beliefs (or colloquially: the dreams and hopes) attributed to a certain group of people. And interestingly enough, they also view camera obscura as an honest representation of reality. For all of those reasons, it begs the question of whose reality are we portraying?

    Men quickly came to mind, after all, they are allegedly found to be the common enemy of this campaign. I see the picture already, no, more accurately, see through the eyes of our Man. There’s a pleasure in looking. That’s why movies work in the first place because they satisfy our discreet fantasies of peering into the lives of others, the film is voyeurism 24 frames a second. If voyeurism is so ingrained in our psyche then what behavior is incidental to it? Female objectification.

    But does it have to be human to human? I digress. What if we took objectification literally and reduce the female to the status of a mere object. What object of desire appeals to the male fantasy and has the capacity to signify a female persona? It could be anything really but I thought cars would serve as an excellent signifier. The variety of models represent different qualities of woman, a Mercedes, resembles your Marie Claire co-worker, dazzling with feminine adornment, and will most likely be beyond your league. Definitely an object of passion.

    I see ourselves recognizing our Man’s flirtatious gaze. He should have enough courage now to run his fingers down the interior of the car. The warning lights flicker on and off. The man was apprehensive at first, but the table is set and the cards have been dealt. He went all-in. He pushed his luck by slowly shifting his focus on to the gearshift. As he gently caresses the phallus the engine whirrs frantically. Ms. Mercy sat in rigor, immobile through the whole ordeal. In actual cases of sexual harassment, the victim’s ability to bring their situation into the threshold of awareness is thwarted by power imbalance. This is where it gets interesting. To promote the cause I want the victim to rise above themselves. In the end, Mercy is going to spit out our Man. And close the door on him.

    Roll curtains.

    A nudge on the shoulder broke me from my reverie. Krisna had a penchant for evidence-based research, his competency is written on a scrap of paper he’s about to hand me. A rundown of the brief, complete with audience analysis and possible loglines. However, this wasn’t what we agreed upon. With a data-driven strategy, our last year’s submission can only go as far as the finals. It contradicts what Aristotle has proven to be unreliable, but regardless, what if? I proposed, what if we worked intuitively instead? You know, let our filthy-empiricist-self sit this one out. I told him about the thing with cars and the Marie Claire analogy. I thought it was clever. He thought so too.



Keywords: Film Production, Behind the Scene, Marxist, Sexual Harassment, ADUINFEST 2020