Chloe Shortt
Midnight Marketing is a loosely formatted parody of advertising and the rambling nature of television broadcasters, particularly in Ireland, over the last 20 years. Set in the last few minutes before the end of programming, it crams as much capitalism and ridiculousness as possible in to assault the senses before bedtime.
With the onslaught of brightly coloured marketing in the digital age, visuals and phrases begin to lose meaning and invade even the quietest moments of our evenings. Midnight Marketing explores the way adverts compete for our attention spans and combines the unnerving feeling of some creative decisions made by broadcasters when viewership and awareness is lowered in the wee hours.
The film asks, or forces, you to laugh at advertising and haphazard low budget television channel management, while also having you second guess whether you really did catch some of its more unsettling elements. Interpretations of any underlying narratives or characters are up to the viewer, as are real world adverts, made by unknown creators with unknown motives. This project as a whole also serves to mangle many mediums of animation together as a final celebration of the four year journey of the BA in Animation.
Spanning thousands of years, geographical locations and societal groups, tattooing is a well documented yet often misunderstood art form. This thesis questions whether male and female characters with tattoos are treated equally by their creators and audiences and arrives at the conclusion that they are certainly not.
