Richard Armitage, pitchman — partial retrospective
Here is a trajectory of Richard Armitage’s previous pitches for projects he’s been involved in. I’ve put the videos below, but earlier commentary is found here and here. There are several more that I remember but haven’t located yet. Will update. The general trajectory seems to be toward less embarrassment with the medium, although in 2013 there were stil signs of discomfort. At the same time, I feel like the later vids are extremely, hmmm. Lacking in something. Energy? Personality? Part of that is the medium, of course, which asks for a particular kind of polish from the speaker.
2010:
2011:
2012:
2013:
2014:
2016:
Me + Richard Armitage 
Great collection! Though you remind me that I think that walking the red carpet event in LA for the premiere of “Captain America” (July 2011) was quite an unpleasant experience for Richard (not only because it was hot!). Listening to those painfully unprepared and tactless interviewers is cringe-making (as for me) even today. By all means we all were ever so longing to see him, after he’d been away for such a long time in New Zealand.
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He really looked miserable and seemed quite uncomfortable with the entire situation. But, no, we didn’t care. That was one of the first live videostreaming moments in the fandom.
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I think he is a very shy person still who always struggles with his shyness. Is he a melancholic by temperament? I think the only way to make him to show a temper is to make him angry. Very peculiar guy with a backbone ☺
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He’s done a lot of voiceover ads — so there seems to be something there about being seen being more of a problem.
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Great post! It was very interesting to watch one after the other. I’m going to come back and watch these again!
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Love the snapchat video in which he tells “We here in LA today for promoting ‘Berlin Station’ . So relaxed and a little bit cheeky RA. It’s a good mood for promoting. Enough energy and personality :-).
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yeah, the reason I didn’t put it in here is that it was pulled by the network. All of these other examples were used in promotion.
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Sorry, I misplaced my comment. It was just my additional comment to my previous comment.
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Excellent and very interesting post. The difference between the early ones and the last one is really glaring. Fascinating.
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what a difference six years makes.
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Definitely a much more polished presentation – clothes, hair, body language. I guess it was inevitable…..
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That has something to do with audiences as well — i get the impression that the British market has different expectations.
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Thanks for collecting these. The Berlin Station one to me is quite wooden (or polished?). I much prefer seeing a bit of his personality. What I actually found most fascinating, though, is watching the clips of Into the Storm in Spanish! Even though I can’t actually understand them, the clips somehow seems more exciting than in English -but of course the actual actors’ voices would be missed!
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There’s just something about the rhythm of Spanish. I listen to a fair amount of Spanish language radio and the DJs always sound so excited!
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Exactly! BTW, how many languages do you speak? I’m thinking I’m going to have to brush up on my French (university) and German (through high school) so I can follow all the comments! Those studies were a long time ago and neither language is used much where I live. Easy to get out of practice.
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I can speak English, Spanish and German. (My PhD studies and subsequent research required me to do a lot of language study, though, so I can read Latin and French quite well, and have briefly studied a few other languages that I don’t read or speak but might be able to fight through with a dictionary / grammar at my side).
My preference is always that people comment in the language they are most comfortable writing in, if I can read it. it doesn’t solve all the problems created by non-native writing of English but at least I have a chance at figuring out what they meant to say. But luckily a lot of people are comfortable writing at least some English.
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That seems to work well. Your responses generally make the gist of the comment able to be understood, but I’m still thinking it would be good for my brain to work through the German with dictionary/grammar in hand. French I have a bit of an easier time with, but still rusty. It’s great that the fandom is so multicultural/multilingual. Makes for a much more interesting exchange.
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One thing you can do if you don’t want to make it into a huge project is to plug the text of a comment into a machine translator like google — then you will have the original and the machine translation side by side. You can read the original and if you don’t understand you can glance at the machine translation, and if the machine translation doesn’t make sense, then you can think about whether you want to resort to a dictionary. This is usually what I do when I have to read Italian.
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A good thought. Can still exercise the brain that way.
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OUI, c’est une bonne méthode, mais elle a ses limites.
Aussi quand j’ai du temps, je préfère utiliser les deux sources de traduction que sont Reverso et Google traduction. La comparaison des trois textes donne une meilleure approche. A vous d’ essayer! Bon courage!
Mon fils, fan de manga, n’avait au départ aucune connaissance de la langue nippone. Aussi, il a pris l’habitude de traduire le japonais en français, puis ensuite le japonais en anglais. Cette triangulaire lui est bénéfique pour traduire et créer des sous titrages en français de films nippons pour les enfants. Tradition familiale?
Il restera toujours, le risque des erreurs d’orthographe en langue française. Ma solution est de traduire en anglais sur google. Le mot, qui alors reste en français est surement mal orthographié.
Mais, soyez tous indulgents, j’aime écrire en anglais, dommage pour les fautes. Je resterai une scientifique, avec de plus en plus de cheveux blancs et une connaissance des langues éternellement approximative.
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With google traduction’s help, without control, SORRY.
YES, this is a good method, but it has its limits.
So when I have time, I prefer to use both translation sources that are Reverso and Google translation. The comparison of the three texts gives a better approach. To you to try! Good luck!
My son, a fan of manga, had initially no knowledge of the Japanese language. Also, he got used to translate Japanese into French, then the Japanese in English. This triangular it is beneficial to translate and create subtitling in French to Japanese films for children. family tradition?
There will always be the risk of spelling errors in French. My solution is to translate into English on google. The word, which then remains in French is probably misspelled.
But, be all forgiving, I like to write in English, too bad for the mistakes. I remain a scientist, with more and more white hair and a knowledge of languages eternally approximate.
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The point isn’t that you take Google translate literally (it often makes mistakes in French idioms, which is curious, given that these are usually fixed phrases), but rather that you take three steps.
1) Read the original and ask if you understand it as it is.
2) If you don’t understand it, read the translation, and ask yourself if it makes sense in comparison with the original text.
3) If you don’t know what it means, and the translation doesn’t make sense, you use traditional tools.
What this is intended to do is to prevent a situation in which the person ceases to engage because they have to look up every single world physically and laboriously. There are languages in which I have to do this, and believe me, it’s a slow, frustrating process, such that I am likely to avoid or abandon it. If there is a partially useful tool that gets a student halfway there, I am all for using it. This strategy will only work for someone who’s had enough French to be able to realize when the machine translation is wrong, and it is useless for composition in French, but that isn’t what she wants to do.
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Je pense qu’il vaut mieux que j’écrive en français, quand je n’ai pas le temps de traduire correctement. Moins de problèmes pour le lecteur et moins de risques pour moi. Bonne lecture.
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It’s really interesting to see all these together. I wonder if he has some discomfort with (or difficulty getting used to) the slog of promoting his work—maybe he prefers to let the work stand for itself, and dreads the promotion bit? I work in a different arts field (and I’ll never be that well-known or subject to that much media attention), but as a fellow creative type I know what it is to be uncomfortable with promoting my work. I’d much rather be just doing it, rather than talking about it in bits and bytes. Anyway, just my two cents.
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I have a vague suspicion that promotion is really something that it never occurred to him that he’d have to do, when he was making his way at the beginning of his career. Because of his start (musicals and then classical theater at LAMDA), he would have been justified in thinking that he’d end up doing little promotional work. “I’d rather do it than talk about it” (paraphrasing) is something he’s said a few times.
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[…] on some of his early and previous outings as pitchman including video clips, see here and here and here and […]
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Richard Armitage’s latest Audible pitch | Me + Richard Armitage said this on June 14, 2018 at 3:35 pm |
[…] a very good pitchman. (For comparison purposes, partial collections can be found here and here and here and […]
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I’m blue green, da ba dee, da ba da | Me + Richard Armitage said this on September 15, 2020 at 3:13 pm |