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Meet the Superhumans

October 29, 2013 by lpaters5@uoregon.edu   

While the Special Olympics is an international athletic and fitness competition for children and adults with cognitive disabilities, the Paralympics is an international competition for physically disabled athletes. This week, my inspiration is an ad for the London 2012 Paralympic Games for Channel 4, Britain’s public service television broadcaster.

I found this video inspiring for many reasons. It’s extremely well shot with great lighting, especially considering that much of the footage involves following moving subjects. I think the music works really well, the text is minimal and well placed, and they have even inserted footage showing accidents or other ways people may become physically disabled, which I thought was interesting and well done. It’s also an amazing showcase of human strength in overcoming obstacles with powerful emotional resonance, or at least I think so. What do you think? Meet the superhumans.


2 Comments »

  1. amandae@uoregon.edu says:

    Hey –this was super intense. I like how it starts off with generic images of sports, so that one wouldn’t know that there was anything different about this event, and then moves into introductions of the characters who are clearly different. I also noticed the effect of the pacing –it uses quicker cuts towards the middle, mashing together accidents and resilience, and at the end is super fast images of action. Their structure builds and quickens to mirror the emotion they want.

  2. oaldakhe@uoregon.edu says:

    That’s pretty powerful. Any story about disabled people will always be touchy but this one has the excitement and triumph theme to it. Here we see the footage as a third person not as the POV of the disabled person, but there’s one great french director who showed us how to see the world through the POV of a disabled person. I’ll post it as my weekly inspiration.

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