2.1 How the ‘Points of View’ advert manipulates sense-making
Activity 3 gave you another opportunity to see how framing shapes sense-making. The next activity will take you into more detail about how that manipulation is achieved and why this matters for sense-making. You will continue to learn experientially about how the transformative changes in your sense-making took place. The ‘Points of View’ advert was, of course, cleverly arranged into three related scenes, each with a voiceover. In Activity 4, you will watch these three scenes in isolation and analyse each of them separately.
Activity 4 Going into more detail about how an event changes in meaning
Scene 1
Watch the first scene of the ‘Points of View’ advert from 00:00 to 00:08, then answer the following questions. You only need to note down a few sentences for each question.
- What did you see and hear in this scene, and from which perspective?
- What did you think was happening in the scene (i.e. what was your definition of the situation) the first time you watched it?
- What cues prompted the impression you first formed about the nature of the event?
Discussion
- Scene 1 starts from a perspective at street level and looks towards a woman who is standing in a doorway with her arms folded. She is looking straight ahead, and across your line of sight as the observer. A man dressed in casual clothes with a closely shaven head then appears from around a corner at a junction on the road that is directly in your line of sight. He appears alarmed. At the same time, a car enters the scene from the same direction. The man quickly turns and runs along the pavement in the direction of the woman, who turns her head to the right towards the man. The soundtrack accompanying this scene is a man’s voice saying: ‘An event seen from one point of view gives one impression’.
- As we, the course team, watched the video, we got the impression that something problematic was happening. For example, we wondered whether the man was escaping from the people in the car. So, implicitly, we were defining the situation as an ‘escape’.
- A few cues led us to form our impression. We noticed that the man was moving with urgency. We also noted that the car appeared from the same direction that the man was running from, and that the people inside the car were looking at him. We also noted the man’s appearance. In particular, his combat-style boots and trousers, and his closely shaven head all influenced our thinking.
Scene 2
Now watch the second scene from 00:10 to 00:17. As before, make some notes addressing the following questions:
- What did you see and hear in this scene, and from which perspective?
- What did you think was happening in the scene (i.e. what was your definition of the situation) the first time you watched it?
- What cues prompted the impression you first formed about the nature of the event?
Discussion
- Scene 2 is from the perspective of an observer positioned behind the first man. As the scene begins, we see him running past the woman. As the camera pans right, this perspective reveals that he is running towards a second man, who is smartly dressed and holding a briefcase. This second man is walking away from our position as the observer, so we see the first man approaching him from behind. As the first man catches up, the second man turns in alarm, lifting his briefcase as if to defend himself. The first man, in turn, lifts his arms as if to grapple with him. The voiceover says: ‘Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression’. It is important that this scene follows the first and shows more ‘things’ and activities from a different perspective.
- At first, we were not sure what was happening, although we could see the first man’s clothing more clearly, which reinforced the observations we made about the first scene. As the first man approached the second man and reached out for the briefcase, we felt certain that we were witnessing a robbery.
- We noted several cues here. First, the first man was running towards the second, and he appeared to reach out for the second man’s briefcase. We also took the second man’s defensive posture as a cue that he was under attack. The briefcase and formal attire of the second man also led us to think he could potentially be a target for a robbery.
Scene 3
Watch the third and final scene from 00:17 to 00:25. Once again, note down your answers to the following questions.
- What did you see and hear in this scene, and from which perspective?
- What did you think was happening in the scene (i.e. what was your definition of the situation) the first time you watched it?
- What cues prompted the impression you first formed about the nature of the event?
Discussion
- The third perspective is filmed from higher up and faces the direction the first man was running from. From this point of view, the observer can see that the second man was just about to walk under a dangerous swinging platform loaded with a pile of bricks that was about to fall onto him. The voiceover in this scene says: ‘But it’s only when you get the whole picture you can fully understand what’s going on’.
- We observed that the first man was, in fact, running to save the second man from serious harm by pushing him to safety beyond the falling bricks and rubble. We came to define the situation as a ‘life-saving event’.
- This scene shows the falling bricks and how they were endangering the second man. The main cue was the observable behaviour itself – the first man did indeed grapple with the second man with the briefcase, but only in order to push him to safety.
OpenLearn - Social psychology: sense-making in crises
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