This week’s lectorial talks about Textual Analysis, to be quite honest, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Even now when I think back, it was such a blur being in the lectorial. Having chosen Cinema Studies for my contextual studies, I should have a good understanding on how to analyse texts, be it, audio, video, written or image. But no, I still find it a struggle to unpack and breakdown whatever’s presented in front of me. Some times I might wonder if I’m thinking or trying to hard when what I’m suppose to get is actually right in front of me.

Then again it might be the short Easter break we had that lasted for a week or so that got my brain a little mushy and lazy. Might take a couple more days for it to get fired up and getting its motors running at optimal level again. I was just breaking into a rhythmic pattern and routine for my day to day activities, attending classes, having lunch, heading to the library to finish up on weekly assignments and not forgetting the graded assessments, and then BAM, a short break and a slice of heaven. Back to lazy old habits of waking up in the afternoon, lazing around and getting nothing done, but minimal cooking and the dishes to get me through the day. Having said that, I did, however, spent the mid-semester break traveling around and Melbourne and to the Great Ocean Road, which I’ll leave it for another post.

No, I’m not complaining or going against the idea of having a mid-semester break, in fact, I love it! I just find it hard to have a start-stop, start again, kind of notion. Being thrown back into the bucket of work and daily routines again. Just have to adjust till I find myself comfortable and almost second nature. But by the time that happens, the winter break might just be around the corner. I definitely have to get used to having this start-stop thing otherwise, I’ll have a struggle throughout my duration of the programme.

Anyway, I digress. So far the only thing I took away from the lectorial for Textual Analysis is, there may be more than meets the eye in terms of information and messages that is being conveyed to the audience. For example, we were given a picture from Brooks Brother advertisement of a man in blue shots and what appears to be a boy in mid air almost landing into a pool of water, and we were asked to analyse it to see what kind of message is the ad trying to convey. At first glanced, it seemed like it was almost contradicting to see how happy the older man seemed like he tossed the young boy into the water with smiles on both of their faces. Something just didn’t connect right there in my head, but due to the text available on the side, it states something like, “You can feel the difference”, and that gives more context to the image. From what I gathered, it’s trying to say that you have confidence to jump into the pool with your clothes on because of how comfortable the cotton from Brooks Brothers delivers, therefore you wouldn’t have the barrier of jumping into the pool with your clothes on.

Another point I gathered was the amount of blue used throughout the image. I would assume blue is the corporate colour for Brooks Brothers from their logo and insignia. Not only the subjects in the image were in blue themed clothing, but the awnings and pool umbrellas took on blue and white stripes too. And not forgetting the blue of the swimming pool, which is more of a given than anything else, whether it was edited in post to make it even more blue is a different question.

I realised that I am able to pull all these out from the image, but I’m not sure what to do with it, or make a main conclusion or even write an analysis out of it. I guess I would have to go back to the reading and lectorial notes and just get at it until the light bulb above my head glows bright. But for now, I might have other things on going that might hold a higher priority such as Project Brief 3, and other assignments from other courses.