THE BADYA COMMERCIAL – THE IMPRESSIVE MIX BETWEEN CREATIVITY AND DIVINITY

“Badya - where life imitates art” is one of the most impressive world commercials from the recent years.

The main elements in the analysis of this commercial are its product characteristics; the archetypal appeals and its communicative approaches from the standpoints of semiotics.

The product

Badya is an integrated residential complex in Egypt which, includes different residential, educational, commercial, recreational, etc. structures. The inspired architects created them with the help of the cutting-edge design.

Еach Badya district has its own hospitals, integrated commercial, administrative and recreational services, schools and offices.

Archetypal appeals of genesis (foundation) and creativity

According to the mythological thinking, only the gods and the heroes are creators - that is, beings who can create the great (divine) phenomena.

Therefore, the people believe that creators have divine status. We transfer this heavenly rank to every great human creation - painting, movie, book, scientific theory, new machine, etc.

The scientists define the creativity as the ability to discover a new and original thing - ideas, artworks, machines, theories, ideologies, religions, etc. It doesn't matter what the human activity is - people can perform it either routinely or creatively.

The creative people interpret the things in a new ways and from a different and unique perspective.

Every great creator invents new rules, with the help of which she or he interprets and even changes the world. The creativity is a divine gift and the normal life is ordinary, boring and grey.

We associate the art, the science, etc. with creativity, that is, with the divine.

The architects and some other inventors who created Badya (The city where life imitates art.) are divine, because, they managed to transform the ordinary life into a heavenly one.

However, the concept of divinity is abstract, that is, the customers will hardly understand it. Therefore, the adpersons of Badya commercial have to translate this abstractness into an intelligible, concrete (tangible) and appealing message.

For this reason, the adpersons used some communicative approaches - from semiotic, narrative and other points of view.

Badya communicative approaches from the semiotics’ point of view

We can analyze the communicative approaches in this commercial from the perspective of semiotics. This is due to the fact that the semiotics is quite useful science in terms of communications and advertising in particular.

The main reason for this is that every semiotic concept is also a creative communicative approach in the advertising and in the other marketing and mass communications.

The creative (divine) adpersons used at least three semiotic concepts in this case - the semantic field, the resemiotization, and the intertextuality.

They also interpreted these concepts in relation to two important codes in art - these of painting and of cinema.

The semantic field

The semantic field is the sum of all signs which structure (form, construct) the concept - in this case all the signs which build the semantic field of creativity and of art.

A very important part of this field is the painting and the cinema.

That is why the adpersons used in Badya commercial the works of several great artists - Andy Warhol, David Hockney, édouard Manet, Edward Hopper, Frida Kahlo, Henry Rousseau, Johannes Vermeer, Paul Gauguin and Van Gogh.

Resemiotisation

The resemiotisation expresses the changes in the signs, the texts and the meanings depending on how the one and the same signs move from one medium to another one, from one linguistic practice to another one, from one context to another, from one cultural space to another, etc.

The resemiotization means that the communicators express (signify) the respective extralinguistic phenomenon in a new way by using different:

·?signs (alphabetic resemiotization).;

·?semantic concepts (semantic resemiotization).;

·?stylistic figures (stylistic resemiotization).;

·?connections (syntactic resemiotization).;

·?cultural, psychological, sociological, technical and other codes (pragmatic resemiotisation), etc.

The reason for the new expressions (resemiotizations) are numerous. Here are some of the most important ones:

·?Satiation - the saturation of communications with the same signs, the same communicative approaches, the same narrative schemes, etc. The consequences of satiation are that we cease to notice the communications and they become inefficient.;

·?Changing the codes - ideological, technical, etc. For example, now we are developing actively the technical codes.;

· Changing the contexts in which the relevant extra-linguistic phenomena take place. The communicators actualize the signs in a new way or even create new sign systems depending on the new contexts.

Thanks to this, the communicators create new or even a completely new texts based on the resemiotization - the new and original interpretations of the already existing signs.

The adpersons translated (re-semeoticized) the meanings of "creativity" in Badya commercial by the use of paintings of some of the world's greatest artists.

They then resemioticized these new meanings secondarily by translating them into the language of cinema.

Intertextuality

The intertextuality is a linguistic and a semiotic concept. It means that communicators generate a new text on the basis of the already created ones.

Typical examples of intertextuality are the allusion, the remake and the parody.

The communicators interpret the original text in a subtle and sophisticated way with the help of allusion.

By the remake, the communicators re-create (adapt) the original text in a new medium, in a new communicative context, etc. The Badya commercial is a typical remake. The adpersons adapted the paintings using the cinematographic codes.

The communicators make fun of the original text with the help of parody.

The codes of painting and the codes of cinema

The code is a concept from pragmatics, one of the four branches of semiotics. The code means a system of rules.

The creators replaced the codes of painting with those of cinema in Badya commercial. Therefore, they:

·?animated the separate actions in the paintings with the help of the cinematography.;

· changed the codes of the separate actions with the codes of the narrative - the communicators connect the individual actions in the different pictures into a harmoniously connected film narrative.

In this way, they expressed the idea of the creative city by the transformation (resemiotizion) of several separated world paintings into a harmonious and continuous film narrative.

One of the most important characteristics of cinema poetics is the music. In this case, the communicators harmonized the camera movement with the melody and with the musical tempo. These two musical phenomena attractively express the perfect sophistication of the animated pictures.

The film text in this case is well integrated and coherent. The reason for this is the camera, which is in constant move.

The cameraman filmed the commercial in a rare format - a single shot. In fact, there are several shots. However, the cameraman and the film director made the montage as invisible as possible for the viewer in order not to lose the feeling of continuous action.

The creators of this campaign managed to bring together all these marketing, archetypal, psychological, semiotic and cinematic phenomena and expressed in an excellent way that the concepts of "creativity" and "divinity" (godliness, spirituality) are closely linked.