For this project we were given the task of creating a public service announcement that was 2-4 minutes long. The purpose of this PSA was to make a call to action for our specific group we researched throughout the term. This call to action was meant to be very simple for our audience to complete. Once the call to action is completed, change is supposed to occur. My PSA centered around the #blacklivesmatter group. I wanted to make an ad that would have a noticeable impact, so I made an ad that appeal to people who were uneducated on #blacklivesmatter and their purpose. My call to action was very simple: I wanted my audience to inform themselves on the #blacklivesmatter group’s purpose. By doing this, I am hoping the progress towards freedom and equality for African-Americans is a step closer.
My goal for this project was to get my audience to become educated on the mistreatment of African-Americans. After they do this, then they can do something about the wrongs that America has committed. If someone truly knows what is going on in this nation, it would be almost impossible for them to not contribute to the cause of #blacklivesmatter. This is why education is so critical to this equation because taking notice of what is going on is the first step towards real change. The more African-Americans who are informed the quicker real change will come. Every contribution progresses us that much more towards equality.
This assignment was the most challenging of the three simply because video is such a complex medium. The best thing I probably did was keep it simple. I stuck to what I knew. I kept the shots simple, as I’m not an expert filmmaker, and I kept the production relatively simple. I had simple transitions where I just faded in and out of scenes. I used my background music where I saw fit. I included narration where I felt my audience needed it. I approached my project this way because I wasn’t dealing with a complex subject. I made my purpose simple because I was trying to appeal to a broad, uniformed audience, so I had to keep the video simple in order for it to be effective. One thing I would possibly do different is included some statistics of some sort in the video. I opted against this because I couldn’t manage to fit it into the narrative in the PSA.