Project Strategy & Approach
To reach young adults on a personal level, I realized that my public service announcement needed to be just as recent and modern as their popular edgy styles. I converted all my photos – originally in color – to black and white images based on the latest trends in modern art and, for the same reason, reduced their size to allow for sufficient white space after adding my text. I mostly chose my third and last color - bright red – because, whether picturing the Red Cross or a first aid kit, the colors traditionally associated with health care have always been red, white and black.
The shade of red I chose also has additional, subtler significances, however, in the project. On the first slide, for instance, the word suicide appears over a backdrop the color of blood. Later, in the skin cancer slide, the same red symbolizes “stop” because I used the color for the “no” in melanoma and filled the “o” with a slash. This same message of “stop” also appears more subliminally in the first and last slides, where white lettering fades in and out over a red backdrop the color of a stop sign.
For my type, I chose to use the sans-serif font myriad pro throughout the entire video and wrote in lowercase lettering to further enhance the modern feel. I also used geometric images, both bars and circles, with comparable widths to the font sizes both to add more modern imagery and draw extra attention to certain words in particular. In all of the scenes, except the opening and concluding ones, I used either black or red lettering or both. In the cases where I used both, I used a concious combination of red and black lettering to draw attention to double meanings in the language.
After creating all my scenes in Photoshop, I imported them to Flash and edited them so that the text and images would appear in the order they should be perceived to create the most sensible story. Generally all of the scenes, except the briefer introduction and conclusion, play at approximately the same rate, and I chose the music “east ender long” in Garage Band both for its similar pace and its alternative, edgy feel. The original clip of “east ender long,” however, runs two to three times longer than the clip I repeated. I decided to cut off the second portion of the tune so that the cycle would have roughly the same duration as each scene and because the second half of the song has a more upbeat tone that contradicts my somber message.
I started with a double loop of the synthetic sound effect during the first slide for the same reason I used the word suicide – to hook the audience’s attention with a startling, uneasy feel. I ended my shortened version of the “east ender long” tune after its fourth loop because that is when the phrase “fall down” begins to slowly sink to the bottom of the screen. In “Ring around the Rosy,” the traditional song about the Bubonic Plague that I took the words from, the lyrics end with, “ashes, ashes, we all fall down"; the participants "die" with the music. Just as the Bubonic Plague could make a person “fall down” prematurely centuries ago, cigarettes, and the other threats outlined in my project, can bring an earlier end to the lives of the Americans exposed to them today.
Key Words That Drive The Visual Solution
Deceptive – (adjective) – tending or having power to deceive: misleading
Synonyms: misleading, illusory, deceiving, unreliable, unrepresentative, dishonest
Survival – (noun) – permanence, duration; the ability to withstand hardship or adversity;
especially: the ability to sustain a prolonged stressful effort or activity
Synonyms: perseverance, stamina, fortitude, endurance, staying power,
continued existence
Irremediable – (adjective) – not reparable: irreparable <irreparable damage>
Synonyms: permanent, irretrievable, irreversible, lasting, permanent, severe,
beyond repair
Prevention – (noun) – the act of preventing or hindering
Synonyms: avoidance, anticipation
Understanding – (noun) – the fact or condition of being aware of something; the range of
one's information or understanding; the fact or condition of having
information or of being learned
Synonyms: awareness, knowledge, comprehension
Project Tagline
Think now. Live to see tomorrow.
Desired Outcome
“Provocative” - The tone of this public service announcement is as serious as its message: your life tomorrow depends on today. Most likely, the majority of the adolescents have already heard this message in some capacity. The goal of this experience is to get them to really listen to the message by retelling the same story in a shocking and unsettling way. Only then, will they care enough to modify their behavior.