“Whitewashing This Generation” PSA Assignment

In this culminating assignment, I decided the best direction to go with would be to create a PSA that both informed my intended audience (see “Hollywood and Diversity Infographic” for more information) whilst also humanizing the issue by setting the footage to an emotional song that fit the mood and gravity of the issue. More specifically, I wanted to show the effect of whitewashing on a generation of children. To make it more personable, I decided to choose my generation and so I made a video that showed incidents of whitewashing from 1997 to 2017. I also decided to make the video follow the mechanics of a particular song and so I chose “Hands Cover Bruise” from the Social Network because I felt it was diverse enough that it wouldn’t feel generic and it fit the mood I was going for. The mood I was going for was to endear people and almost emotionalize this always forgotten about issue (until recently). The style of the video mimicked those seen on Facebook from pages such as the Huffington Post or AJ+.

“Hands Cover Bruise” starts with a piano and so I decided that the first couple videos would follow the repetition of this riff. The pacing of the video increases with every year so that I would not be boring the viewer with a repetition of time length and video format for every year. Therefore, you might notice that after the first two videos, the year starts to occupy the first half of the riff and then the song goes into a raw violin for which I made the videos go even faster. Therefore, I decided to switch from videos to pictures so that the viewer would be able to understand the incident of whitewashing quicker. I also thought that making the year incidents quicker would also have an overwhelming effect on the viewer, where they would realize that whitewashing happens all the time. To drive this point in, I decided to show several incidents for 2016 and 2017. I also made the clips longer so that the viewer would notice just how egregious whitewashing has become even in this day and age.

For my call to action, I decided to showcase one of the organizations that is fighting the lack of diversity in Hollywood by creating more jobs for actors of color. I also decided to give the viewer three options, they could either donate, volunteer their time or attend the organization’s monthly meetings but this last one only works if the viewer is in the California area.

Check out the video to see if I was successful! Link : https://youtu.be/laAZxghuRpE

I learned a lot about what to consider when making an effective video that I had never really considered before. For example, I learned to think in shots and to always make sure that my video was connected to some intended genre, whether I intended to follow this genre or stray from it. I also learned about setting videos to music which served as the inspiration for my own video and is the concept that I am the most proud of from this project. I had always listened to “Hands Cover Bruise” before doing this project but after reading that advice, I just knew that that was the direction I wanted to take this video in. I think it proved effective due to the various tones in the song and the how it made my jump cuts all the more effective and jarring as the video passed from year to year. This proved especially effective for the 2017 title card where all the audience heard was the long dip that a brass (?) instrument did to create even more of a jarring effect for the last year since everything before it was just the same raw violin.

For a final draft, I think I would have cleaned up the video a bit more. For example, there was an error and the split screen didn’t show for one of the years. I also think I would have taken out the fade for the movie titles and characters names in the quicker year shots. In addition, I would have also replaced the Beautiful Mind example with video instead of pictures and I would have increased the length of some of the clips.