You Can Shine

This advertisement plays almost like a movie trailer for a inspirational, melodramatic, coming-of-age, being-different-but-overcoming-it, success story. It traces through the story of a innocent, downtrodden deaf girl who is trying to learn the to play the violin. The producers structured the advertisement to evoke a strong sense of empathy and sympathy for the deaf girl by having the world seemingly give up on her and her dream. Not only do other children pick on her for being deaf and working towards her dream, even her instructor gives up on her. With tears in her eyes, she leaves the music studio to find a man playing the violin on the street who uses sign language to encourage her to not give up. "Why do you have to be like others? Music is a visible thing" He tells her.

The camera shows a poster for a classical music contest, as the music changes from the peaceful and calming Pachelbel's Canon to a high-paced and intense force of sound from the piano which disrupts the viewer and increases the drama further. When the clip arrives at the the concert and she begins to play, the viewer is completely on her side. She has gone through so much hardship to get to this position that we absolutely want her to succeed. The advertisement then uses the connection we've developed with her when it starts focusing on her hair. The first three quarters of the clip use all the romanticism and drama of the girl learning to play and overcoming her situation to build this connection to the viewer. Next, that energy is channeled into her final performance when the music reaches a climax and her hair is flying everywhere.

By actually analyzing the advertisement with logic, we know that her hair probably had nothing to do with how she finally succeeded in producing something great, but it sets up such a powerful structure of feeling that subconsciously the connection is made between the inspirational story and her beautiful, flowing hair. I'm not usually one to have an emotional reaction to advertisements, but this one was pretty good. I'll be surprised if you haven't gotten some chills by the end of this.