Blog Post #6

Brad Paisley in the "Welcome to the Future" video uses different elements of logos to aide his lyrics. The video really follows along with the lyrics most of the time. In one of the first scenes, he is shown as a kid playing PacMan in an arcade, and then it is cut to Paisley having PacMan on his phone. And next, is a elderly lady showing the letters her husband used to have to write to her, and then it shows a video clear from Tokyo. These are obviously visual compare and contrasts that Paisley uses in his videos.

I also think Paisley created visual unity by using repetition. The most noticeable one is the kids shown repeating "I want to be..." and then the contrasts there are with some of the kids and what they are saying. I also think the colors and scenes are repeating. Throughout the video, a lot of lights are shown, majority being bright, neon colors, such as, the city lights and carnival lights. When one thinks back to the video there is rarely a part that doesn't have some kind of eye catching color to it.

With this being said, now we should ask the question "Why?" to all of these strategies. Paisley obviously had things he wanted you to remember from the song and video, and it is different for each person, but for me it was the repetition and comparing and contrasting. But why exactly did he choose to do this? I think only Paisley himself knows. There are some things we could assume, like using the children as a repetition. I mentioned this in my previous blog post, but I think it was because Paisley wanted to point out we are now living in his future, or idea of the future. Take into consideration these kids thoough, is this their future? No, as Paisley pointed out, their future is yet to come. The compare and contrasting of events we may also guess why. Probably to give you a better idea of the changes we have went through in 50 or so years. Now, we question the bright colors. Paisley probably considered other options, such as having it all in black-and-white. If one was to imagine it in black and white, would it have been as effective at enhancing the song? One thing I noticed is the colors are colors we see regularly, especially those in bigger cities. But, thinking back in the 50's and 60's I do not think of those colors. So maybe Paisley was trying to portray that so much has changed, even colors.

Using the logos for this video also ties into ethos and pathos. I have previously talked about pathos from this video, so I am going to focus more on ethos now. When thinking about how Paisley came off in this video, I think you must take into consideration the age of the audience. I am sure people around Paisley's age would have agreed and related to this song and video more so than young kids. I think to an older audience, Paisley has a good point and I bet some people have felt a connection with the song. I'm not saying this couldn't happen for younger kids too, but like I said, their future is just starting, maybe in 50 years they can also say "Welcome to the Future".