I had the most fun making this video because video editing is something I’ve had a lot of experience with (especially with iMovie).  My focus is on the young adults in our current day and age who are still shying away from coding when technology comprises a large part of our future.  I persuade people that coding is a necessary and basic skill to learn.  A short PSA type video is a great attention grabber because it’s to the point and with the right editing, visuals and audio together make it easy to digest information.  My audience is students who are still in school and have career choices to make, which is essentially high school and college students.  This is the best audience to speak to because these are the people that will feed into the job industry in the next years.  Additionally, the relatively new explosion of tech really applies to the current generation’s youth.  To inform and convince the upcoming working generation that coding is essential to our future is why I made this public service announcement.

Making this short video took a lot more than it might appear to.  I had to dedicate hours to this video to make sure that each fraction of a second of this one minute and 45 second video was perfect (this means audio noise control with music versus narration, transitions, speed, and more).  I took footage from YouTube videos and used iMovie to enhance these shots in a way, like adding title cards to help visually aid the audio.  I used transitions to segment the video, albeit its short length, to break it down and make it comprehensible for the audience.  Even within the short length, there are sections that I make apparent in order to build up to the call-to-action.  With the animation voiceover, I had to strip the audio and re-record the words with my own voice because of the background music in the original clip.  The whole video was made with many, many edits to various recorded footage (both online and taken myself) in order to make it a seamless, cohesive video.

With the past two projects, I focused on the gender gap in computer science, but throughout my research, I realized that the world doesn’t need just more women but more people in general.  The surplus of jobs and shortage of skilled employees is an outstanding problem, which is why I decided to modify my issue and audience to solve a larger problem at hand.  Although it’s not direct, I do try to address the gender issue in this video.  The (relatively) overwhelming presence of women in the video will make people subconsciously think twice of the gender gap in tech and realize that more girls are coding than they think.  It brings attention to the fact that coding need not be a gendered topic and when people see the even divide in the video, it’ll affect their pre-conceived image that coding is a male-dominated field.

-Jane