November Rain

Blogger had just given me an error message when I finished typing this post so I just lost everything I typed and now I’m retyping this entry.

It is raining now and I like this November cos it’s refreshing and cool. And most importantly it is driving away the haze. Last week was presentation week. The presentation for Literary Stylistics was on Tuesday 31 Nov 06. Our group did a song analysis on Graduation by Vitamin C. This project was to use the framework from the lecture on Sounds of Poetry and try to use this framework to see if it can be used to analyse songs. The framework includes the metrical system, the rhyme, the intonation and diction, etc. Besides this, we also analysed the additional dimensions of songs which include visual analysis of the MTV and also analysis of its narrative structure. We found that the poetic tools cannot be superimposed onto songs and when analyzing songs, we should take into consideration the melody of the song which tie in with the visual elements and background music in order to give a holistic analysis of the song. The following songs are analysed by the other groups:

1. Pussycat Dolls – Beep
2. Eminem – Lose Yourself
3. Muse – Starlight
4. Muse – Soldier’s Poem

I especially like the Pussycat Dolls song because it’s quite nice and the feeling is quite cool. The other unique analysis by the group is for the Muse song. The group did a research based on whether the lyrics was created first before the tune was created or whether the tune was created first before the lyrics were created and thus these elements could affect each other intimately which affected the entire song. For the presentation this week, the following songs are analysed:

1. Grandmaster Flash – White lines (Retro Song)
2. Eminem – Cleanin’ Out My Closet
3. Eminem – Like Toy Soldiers
4. Papa Roach – Between Angels and Insects

For the presentation on advertising, it was during last week on Thursday 2 Nov 06. The project was very interesting and I like it very much because it is doing a research on StarHub’s MaxOnline broadband service which I’m using this service and I had wanted to do a research in order to understand this service better. Besides the normal survey that I had created in order to gather information about consumer opinion with regards to the service, I had also went down to the Head office of StarHub at AOS building at Ayer Rajah Crescent on 23 Oct 06 to do a face-to-face interview with the marketing personnel of StarHub in order to gather more in-depth information about their marketing campaigns. My group’s final advertising campaign consisted of print advertisements with 3 scenes that promotes the main theme of “Maximise your time spent with loved ones” The other group presentations are really superb. These are the list of brands that the other groups had presented on.

1. Charles and Keith (Colour Print Ads on MRT Trains)
2. Fragrance BBQ (Live undergraduate actors for TVC ad)
3. Tiger Beer (Colour Sketch that was made into a TVC ad)
4. Osim UZap (Sketch Storyboard)
5. Tiger Beer (Colour Print ads – quite professional)
6. EU YAN SENG BOTTLED BIRD’S NEST EU-RE-KA (Sketch Storyboard)

In my personal opinion, I think the video advertisement made by the group on Fragrance BBQ is the best because making a video advertisement really takes a lot of effort and their jingles are also quite catchy.

I was in charge of the Q & A session for the presentation. The lecturer had asked about the survey that was done whether it was done online or offline and how many respondents were gathered. He also asked why we choose to target the age group of 19-30 and not to target the rest of the age group. My reply is that our advertising objective is to increase brand preference among this age group in order to get subscribers to SingNet and PacNet to subscribe to StarHub’s broadband service. Another problem was that we did not include the USP for the service on the slides which the other lecturer pointed it out to us.

Yesterday was the last lecturer and tutorial session for Ecommerce. During tutorial, we basically played a Jeopardy game which is a question and answer quiz session. The purpose of this game is to help us revise the basic terms and concepts for the modules and the questions are quite oki.

The final project for this semester is for the storytelling module and after that would be the final exams. I think tomorrow's playtesting session will be quite interesting....