My response:
In the ‘freeze-frame’ picture of blood suspended in the air around the anguished look on the man’s face, the visual irony is used to represent the idea of the phone, a seemingly insignificant and harmless object being a lethal catalyst in the context of a car journey when someone gives it more attention than the road in front of them. The origin of the blood in the photo is the speaker grill of the phone, and this is incongruous as we would expect the blood to come out of the person, and this highlights the true source of an accident of this nature and brings in a bit of ridicule of the man. In addition, the sharp red colour of the blood stands out against the lack of colour in both the foreground and mise-en-scene, and this accentuates the salience of the blood and makes it clear that this PSA represents a grim topic of sudden and unexpected death.
Shiv response:
The creator of this PSA uses the incongruity of the blood splattered across the subject’s face, and the fact that his setting of a movie theatre puts him in no peril, to ironically establish the dangers of talking while driving. Rather than urging viewers to avoid talking while driving, this PSA urges viewers to not talk to anybody who is driving a vehicle. Although we are able to logically infer that the blood spewing from the phone is from the person the subject is talking to, our visceral reaction of the man being covered in blood causes us to identify him as the cause for the accident, holding not only the driver, yet also the caller liable. It is this liability, established through the irony of the fact that the man is bloody despite the fact that he himself is not involved in the accident, that persuades the viewers to avoid calling people while they are driving.
Anthony response:
The visually arresting advertisement, “Don’t talk while she drives,” is a disturbing statement against having phone conversations while driving. Whilst the focus during car accidents is usually on the driver, this advert strikingly shifts the camera perspective to the person responsible for making the call, in effect, shifting some of the onus and guilt onto them. The blood splattering out of the phone, metaphorically representative of the driver dying a gruesome death from an accident, drives home the tangible danger of this type of distraction. The shocking incongruity of blood spraying out of an inanimate object, the phone, combined with the dramatic framing of the instinctive aversion of the man, almost as if freeze framing a real video, creates a striking visual irony as if he is stained with blood by the murder