Public Service Announcement

My First Project as a Junior!

Hello everybody, it's good to see you again after a long summer. I'm now a junior in entertainment video, and in a class with both juniors and seniors. You've got a lot to look forward to this year. To start the year though, we got into groups and made a PSA of our choosing. Between us, we could either do internet addiction, bee protection, suicide prevention, or teen smoking. We chose the latter. So now I'll take you through the process.

Pre-Production

So of course the very first thing we did in our groups was write down our ideas and pitch them to each other. The idea we decided to go with was Lizzie's. She wanted to do an anti-smoking PSA based off a video she saw:

Well, as much as we wanted to use a fire extinguisher, we couldn't. So instead we decided to use a water cup.

Then we assigned roles. Since it was Lizzie's vision, we decided it was best she was the director and production designer. I called the role as screenplay writer. My friend Damien was the cinematographer. My friend Piper was the art director and one of the actors. And last but not least, Darby was the main editor (we all had to do our own edits, but her's was the one we showed the class). We also got a note for another actor, Nick, who is in another class.

So then I wrote the script and Lizzie drew the storyboard. The storyboards were pretty forward, but I had to revise the script a few times. I discovered you have to read the lines aloud and decide if a character would naturally say that. In the end though, it was pretty good.

After we had both of those done though, we were ready to move onto:

Production

The morning before we filmed, we brought all the props we needed to school. The main prop was fake cigarettes from Party City. To make the smoke we needed for some of the shots, we used Pixie Stix dust. And finally, a water cup Lizzie has.

The first day, we got a few shots. However, we could not get a tripod or dolly, so the first few shots were quite shaky. Then the second day, we had a camera with a messed up exposure. So believe it or not, 99% of the shots used in the PSA were shot on an iPhone. Surprisingly, shots on the iPhone looked better than shots on the film camera; they were stabler and clearer.

Nick actually did not remember to wear the same shirt for the shoot, so we had to reshoot everything. That was good though, we ended up with more high-quality shots. We managed to film everything the second day.

Post Production

Darby was the official editor, so we showed her edit to the class. However, we all had to do our own edits.

Editing was pretty straightforward for me. However, my goal this year is to create more cinematic videos, so I paid more attention to everything in editing. Unlike last year, all the shots are color corrected. Raw footage films are something I'd like to leave in the past. I also want to practice cutting more precisely, so the actor's movement flows more naturally.

The only problem I really had was at the very end, when Nick says,"Before you light up." The water cup hitting the ground was very loud, so I tried to lower the volume for that specific area. However, when I did, you can hardly hear that line. I had to decide between the audience yelling in pain because of the sudden crash, or lowering the volume and hardly hearing what Nick said. Obviously, I chose the latter. I tried to make it up by writing the same message at the end. Sorry guys.

This is also the time I looked for statistics about smoking to put on the last few cards. Smoking is scary people, don't do it.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm quite proud with how this turned out. Sure, it's not quite up to the par I set for myself this year, but hey, it's really good for the first project of the year. The only thing I would do differently is to be aware of sound during production, and I just explained why.

Well, that's all I have for now. Can't wait to make more films!