Public Service Announcement

   Concept, Pre-Production, Production, Post-Production

   In my group, we decided that Healthy Eating, especially in school lunches, was an important topic that needed to be covered and promoted. Once we came up with our idea, we decided that our PSA would be energetic and to the point, rather than making it more meaningful with cinematic shots. We pitched the idea of having the food thrown from each side of the screen and tossing away the unhealthy option to make the video more interesting and easy to follow instead of just explaining which options were healthier. Another idea was to include athletes, students, teachers, and staff to make the video relatable to everyone in the school building. I was in charge of organizing the props and making sure which props we were going to use on specific filming days. We filmed over the course of 4 days and we filmed mostly during the class period. In regards to production, we spent about 20 minutes with each actor or actress. We filmed one shot after school and we used a gymnast, but the shot was wrong and we were too crunched for time to re-film it. We recorded each shot 3 times just to make sure that we had one good one to use in the video. Although I had the role of art director, everyone had to edit their own version of the PSA. Most of the people in my group added captions to theirs to explain what was happening with each shot, but I felt that it was self-explanatory and I didn't feel the need to add a lower third. I did color correct every shot to make sure that it was well exposed and bright enough to see each item. I learned the importance of recording a shot more than once so that in case there was something odd in a shot (which happened multiple times in my group), it was able to be replaced by the same shot in a different recording to solve the issue.

5 Guarantees and General Thoughts

   When it comes to the 5 e-Communication Guarantees (Technical Skills, Communication, Leadership, Collaboration, and Project Management), all 5 of them were used throughout the process of this entire PSA. For example, I had to re-familiarize myself with Premiere Pro since I had not used it all summer. I remembered the skills and short cuts that I had learned last year and I implemented them in my PSA. My group made a group chat through GroupMe to confirm our filming days and which props we were using each day. We also communicated our ideas during our Pre-Production period and during filming as well. Although our director was the "leader" of our group, we all had ideas to share and consider and we took control over our positions within the group. The group collaborated on our initial ideas and the different actors, props, shot types, and editing style for our PSA. Each PSA was a little different and had its own style to it. Since I was also working on client work at the same time as working on this PSA, I had to budget my time for working on both projects, which was PSA editing mostly during class and working on other projects after school or during Raven 50. I really liked our concept of the PSA and how it got to the point and didn't have too many extra details that were hard to grasp or understand. I liked how our shots looked and the consistency throughout the project. However, I would have liked our actors to display each food item more so that the viewer would be able to see each object better and understand the difference between the healthy and non-healthy item quicker. During critiques, some students mentioned that the objects went away too quickly for them to recognize what it was. From viewing my peers work, I would like to enhance my next project by creating more cinematic pieces with different shots and filming techniques that I haven't gotten to work with yet. Also, the shot of the lunchbox getting thrown to the side of the frame and then the next shot showing the lunchbox getting packed on the table was a consistency issue that I didn't realize until I was critiqued on it, so I would have changed that to make it more understandable. I liked how this project was a smooth introduction to get back into making projects and although it required the same planning and workload as my sophomore year projects, I liked how it took only a couple weeks to produce instead of deadlines getting pushed back and dragging the project on for several more days or weeks.