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".

Blog Post #4

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this song and video were created to make a person stop and think about how far we have come in the past years. Also, using the children, we also need to think about the future. This video tries to portray that all of the changes have been positive and for the better, but Paisley fails to mention what all of the technology and new things do negatively. For example, as a country we were first relied on agriculture and we were very construction oriented. And now, machines have taken man's place so we strive from manufacturing. Just one example of a negative impact this had, was it created a number of people to lose their jobs. I think that this change was inevitable, and as we do need to be optimistic about it, we must also never forget about the hard manual labor the people of this country used to do.

"Welcome to the Future" will inevitably create emotion and stir in many people. I feel like for the most part, it will be positive, but I am sure someone will have something negative to say. Brad Paisley actually wrote the song himself, so he most likely took the audience's feelings into consideration when writing this song. Most people can't write something without thinking what the audience will think about it. Maybe all-in-all, Paisley actually created this song because he wanted emotion from his audience. He probably took into consideration the pathos. In "Compose, Design, Advocate", pathos asks the question "Do you try to evoke emotions and feelings in your audience, or do you try to present arguments unemotionally?" And I think if someone asked Brad Paisley this song, I find it hard to believe he wrote these lyrics so no one would have an emotion towards it. He wrote "So many things I thought I'd never see / Happening right in front of me" and if one was to take these words to heart and consider everything that has happened, they would probably agree with him. Sometimes the world moves so fast and we become accustomed to all of the advances we make, we forget about how it used to be. For me, the final message I got was to be reminiscent on the past, but look to the future.