Harry Brown

I went to the cinema the other night to see Harry Brown. Its a movie about an old man Named Harry who lives in a poor council estate in England. It looks rather rough and not a very nice place to stay. Harry has a friend, one friend and his wife past away in hospital.

Now, there is a group of teens that hang about outside the flats that Harry and his pal stay in, causing bother, vandalizing, beating up people etc..Harry's friend has a lot of bother with this group and has talked to the police but they never did anything.

One night he is sitting sleeping in his living room, he wakes up because of smoke, the group had set a paper bag, filled with dog poo, on fire and put it through his letter box. The old man then looses his temper, and that's it. He goes down to face them with a knife and the gang end up killing him.

the film then goes on and Harry wanting his revenge starts killing all the young ones, he dosnt take to well and ends up in hospital. Then the police finds out that it him but he gets away as he saves a police officers life and its all a happy ending.

But the point to me telling you this is, this actually happens, Gangs do go about, killing people and not a care in the world. It really shocked me and also upset me to a certain extent. It would really upset me if the elderly were having problems with certain gangs and did talk to the police and nothing was done to help them. Some of them may be to scared to talk to the police in case something happened to them. I hope that this film will raise awareness, It certainly did for me.

Why we Buy?

I find it Interesting that I have never actually noticed that the things that are most needed when we do our shopping are always at the very back of the shop. For instance, Milk, we go in to a supermarket to buy one carton of milk, we have to walk through the shop to the very back to get to the milk. Only on our way we end up picking up a few things, maybe something thats on special offer, or something that you think 'yum' to. And the next thing you know your standing at the checkout with a whole basket of goods, been in the shop for 20 minutes, and you only went in for milk.

Another thing that interests me is that all the mid expensive products to expensive are shelved in the middle at eye level, to catch the customers eye if they are in a rush maybe? And all the 'asda smart price' and 'tesco value' for example and on the very bottom shelf.

I had this experience yesterday, I went to tesco's to buy something for tea, I knew exactly what i was having and what i had to get. It was four things in total that i needed and i came out with all sorts.

I never actually thought about this until last fridays lecture, and know I think I am going to be more aware, and also might save a wee bit of money.

My top five!

Here I had to decide what my top five websites are for keeping up-to-date with the latest developments in graphic design:

• http://www.creativereview.co.uk/ - This is a design magazine which contains articles on all aspects of the communication arts. It is very interesting and keeps me up-to-date with all the different and new styles.


• http://ilovetypography.com/ - I absolutly love typography and took a great interest to it whilst at college. This website is so useful and has information on how to make fonts aswell as different typographic designs for some inspiration.


• http://design-council.org.uk/ - This website is very useful and there is alot of information on here, you can look at live issues which helps you get up to speed with the design issues driving social and economic change which is interesting.


• http://thedieline.com/ - This website was introduced to me whilst I was at college and I find it very useful for packaging design. Also it keeps you up to date with whats new.


• http://designweek.co.uk/ - This is originally a magazine which I have seen before, I found it really Interesting and also I really like their Identity, I think its really effective.

I also had to decide what my top five websites are for keeping up-to-date with developments in the news and fields outside my discipline:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/
• http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news
• http://promo.net/pg/
• http://gaurdian.co.uk/
• http://facebook.com/

the salesman's body language

I was investigating into the body language of the salesman, and how this can sometimes be very intimidating and persuasive by using facial expressions and body gestures. If I was to go into a shop and the salesman was trying to sell me something and had no enthusiasm then it wouldn't intrigue me at all. Whereas if I was to go in and he/she came up to me with excitement and actually came across as he/she was interested in selling me the product, then thats a different story.

Bibliography

Arnold, TJ (2009) Understanding Retail Managers' Role in the Sales of products and Services, journal of retailing 85 (2): 129-144

I found this article interesting as the author states that the reason for the good sales is due to the managers focusing on sales planning and transformative leadership behaviors. I dont think this is the case, I believe that if the salesman is enthusiastic and comes across a happy cheerful person then that can be very hard to say no to sometimes.


Berry, TR (2008) Getting to know the competition: a content analysis of publicly and corporate funded physical activity advertisements, Journal Of Health Communication 2008 Mar 13 (2), 169-80

I think this article is interesting as it is looking into advertisements using physical activity to sell a product. It says that the majority of advertisements (57.9%) were from commercial advertisers using physical activity images to sell products or to encourage brand recognition, but then goes on to say that most of them couldn't actually tell us the benifits of using physical activity. So why do it then?


Kim, S (2009) Towards automatic causality boundary identification from root cause analysis reports, journal of intelligent manufacturing 20 (5): 581-591 Sp. Iss.

In this article it interested me that its shows the results of developing and evaluating an automatic approach that identifies boundaries from expressions. I find it really interesting that there is actually rare and unpredictable behaviours of certain words, I will have to further into this to find out what they are.


Myers, G (1991) Politness and certainty: the language of collaboration in an AL project, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 21, No. 1 pp. 37-73

This article goes on to talk about groups can be investigated through analysis of linguistic freatures associated with politeness strategiess. Not really sure if this is relevant to what I am looking for but will be interesting to see if I can research into it more.


Tamietto, M (2009) Unseen facial and body expressions trigger fast emotional reactions, Proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 106 (42): 1766-17666

In this article it talks about emotional contagion. I find this interesting as it all starts by how facial expressions and body gestures induce highly similar expressive responses.


Wrathall, J (2009) Body language. Sight and Sound, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 40-42

In this article the author describes the experience of being a writer on a film set when his screenplay "good" was filmed. I find it interesting how the author finds it interesting that a great actor can speak the lines he wrote and really make the role his own. It is like he is taking aback and it could be quite emotional?

Advertising

Advertising for a salesman point of view, I have researched and looked into how the salesman can make his move by talking people into buying something that they never intended on buying.

They are very persuasive and are good at there job.

I have looked at different advertising techniques and how they possibly bring the customers/buyers into to shop to find out more information about a product or a special offer (everyone loves a bargain)

This is where the salesman works his magic.