Here is a PSA announcement for a robber out of New York City, where my department is located. He is wanted for multiple robberies at gunpoint. He is a 40 to 50 year old male about 5’8 to 6 foot. I dont even know why im even posting this because im going to catch him in like two hours; yeah im that good
Check out my first PSA from the BWA in the WIDOW organization! I made it in iMovie for one of our community news updates. I think its definitely worth 5 stars
I have created a Public Service Announcement (5 stars) that has to deal with gun rights. If you don’t like guns, I don’t like you. Guns are a big part of my life and I’ve been around ‘em since I was young. I frankly don’t give a shit about your opinion on them because in this case, all that matters is my opinion. My pistol is always on my waist or in my hand. It’s just natural to me.
The point of this assignment was to create a PSA for something you are really passionate about and I’m quite passionate about these babies. I think this issue needs to be resolved because dumbness need to stop thinking that the guns are the problem. PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM. I get so heated about this topic because of the unfathomable stupidity of the humans of this world. Guns are made to protect. I protect my clients with my gun. You protect yourself with your gun. The guns don’t shoot. People do.
I created this PSA using iMovie and strung the pictures together with some stats and what not. I chose not to add background music because of the video clip and plus it makes it more serious without the music. I got the video clip from here and used MPEG Streamclip to trim it down to exactly what I needed.
Again, if you don’t like guns, then go on somewhere because this isn’t the blog for you.
For five stars Cutty Wise chose “Public Service Announcement” video assignment. With exemplifying a portrayal of growth in a destructive and deteriorating environment, Cutty Wise showed a progressive and magnificent stride towards internal evaluation of the character he is fit to become. His journey is summed up in this short five-minute PSA and advertisement of another option to the hoppers and corner slangers in The Wire.
It is set to theme music which serve a renewed faith and hope to the innocent caught in the web of corruption. Let it serve as a motivator and driving force, saving the youth from falling victim to the crime ridden streets of East Baltimore!
http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/public-service-annoucement/
5- Stars
As always, the only tools needed to make this one was my laptop camera and a room with decent lighting.
Now as for why I chose this one, this is a more interesting story. For the past 13 (soon to be 14) years of my life, teachers/professors have always been assigning work over break periods. I for one have gotten tired of it! This is not a laughing matter, this is 100% serious! What is the point of break if we have work to do! I mean think about it; sometimes, you go on break simply to work on more stuff for school. That is utter garbage! With that in mind, I believed that it was time to say something about this. More importantly, I believe we need more PSA’s stating that we don’t need work for breaks.
No one likes it. That is all.
If you were following my blog during the month of October, you are familiar with my group’s radio show. Since the assignment was due shortly before Halloween (the show actually premiered the eve of Halloween, which was perfect!), us group members decided to have a spooky theme. We decided two of us would narrate scary stories and two or three would talk about haunted places in Virginia. Each of us also was required to create a commercial and bumper to include in the show.
I chose to narrate the Creepypasta story The Rake, and for my commercial, I created a parody of a PSA. In the parody, I urged those who are prone to mischief on Halloween and/or Devil’s Night to stay away from Ouija Boards. I recorded my voice narrating a super serious warning and underlaid it with piano loops from Garageband. The resulting effect was supposed to echo the old The More You Know PSAs (The included example is from the TV show Scrubs, because Scrubs is awesome).
When I was browsing for more video assignment options, I stumbled upon one that suggested you create a PSA. It could be “as serious…or as silly” as I wanted, so I decided this would be a perfect way to continue my Ouija Board PSA from the previous post! Oddly enough, however, I didn’t want to star in this video or get anyone to film the lines for me, so I decided not to go the More You Know route.
Instead, I planned the video to appear as a set of memories overlaid with flashback voices that narrate/hint at the story of a young adult messing around with Ouija Boards at peers’ urging and then suffering the consequences.
First things first: I had to find royalty free or creative commons footage. I looked around for stock footage, and GettyImages as well as Shutterstock offered quite a nice library, but everything cost money that I currently don’t have. I was seriously frustrated, because there were some genuinely creepy cemetery scenes offered by those sites!
I debated on taking my camera and exploring the nearby Confederate cemetery for material, but I was a bit too creeped out by that idea.
Out of curiosity, I decided to see if YouTube offered any royalty free stock footage, and lo’ and behold, I found several users that offered such resources! Of course, I gave them credit at the end of my video and linked to them at the end of this post.
I found some excellent overhead, cloud, time-lapse footage, various Halloween-themed footage, and several cemetery shots. After doing a mental happy dance at my good fortunate and the gift of technology that kept me from having to crawl around a probably-haunted-cemetery at night time, I started to edit the video together. I downloaded the clips after converting them to .mp4s thanks to this site.
It took a lot of work to cut out different areas of the original footage. I first broke apart the already-short narrative into shorter scenes: the urging of the protagonist to play with Ouija Boards and goof around in creepy areas, the actual act of using the Board by candlelight, and then the paranormal consequences.
I paid close attention to details such as lighting/angle to capture the dreamy, snapshot mood I was aiming for in my overall video, and I even added a few filters to different scenes to enhance the emotion I wanted emphasized for that particular shot (for example, the cemetery has a filter called “Old World” that echoes the concept of the dead and the past).
The only voice overs in this video would be the voices of the main character’s friends talking through their experience, so all other context was established via inserted title and transition slides. I carefully timed and chose the designs of each slide to be consistent with the straightforward, PSA shell but also effective with a spooky twist such as red lettering or jarring fade ins/fade outs.
Next, I added sound. I found a royalty free, free-to-download music site and searched their horror genre, which had some very nice material. I selected a piece called “Possession” to drive home the idea that a spirit can come forth from the Board and wreak havoc in a human’s life and mind. I then added it to the video.
I was at work when it came time to record the friends’ voices. Since I really wanted to accomplish this project on my own, I didn’t ask for any actors to help me record. Rather, in between appointments, I casually slipped into a consultation room and privately recorded myself reciting a simple script so that I didn’t look insane out in the reception area muttering to myself about Ouija Boards.
iMovie has a built-in recording option, so I went ahead and took advantage of that shortcut rather than messed around in Garageband, which took a few trials and errors but was quite simple once I figured out the controls.
I lowered my voice slightly to imitate male voices as well as kept my own tone to reflect females: a mixed group of Ouija Board participants. The script was interspersed with lots of “dudes” and “likes” to give it an authentic, irresponsible, young adult feel. I also allowed myself to do the voices in one take to again increase the conversational, off-the-cuff style.
To make sure the voice wasn’t too loud (I recorded it close to my microphone, so the track was automatically louder), I turned up the music a bit higher than originally intended and turned down the voice over’s volume. This took three or four watch-throughs and some tinkering, but the levels were finally acceptable.
Actually a LOT more fun than it looks…
I then stepped back out into the reception area of my work and discovered an appointment had been waiting for me while I recorded a track about Ouija Boards. Whoops. Thankfully, she was a few minutes early, anyway, and very understanding.
Lastly, I wanted a scream. After browsing freesounds.org, I found a digitally altered scream with some added effects that I actually liked more than a plain scream! I added in the screech right after the NOT ANYMORE frame and over the few seconds of suspenseful, terrifying blackness.
After adding on end credits, I uploaded the piece to Vimeo! The flickering light effect followed by the skull face is particularly effective, if I do say so myself! (I had to reverse the Reaper footage so that his skeleton face would be one of the first things you saw!)
The sponsoring organization and hashtag (trying to make this PSA for modern audiences, y’know!) are made up, by the way, and if either are currently in use, I had no idea and would be interested to see what people are saying about the trends!
Let me know if my PSA spooks you into not messing with Ouija Boards, or, let me know if you’ve ever had a noteworthy Ouija Board experience!
Credits:
This was one of my favorite assignments to create. I (along with fellow ds106er Kisha) am on the board for the UMW consent campaign. There’s information about it in the video and you all should come take the pledge to always have consent!
I built this assignment around the “Let’s Talk About Consent” video–watch the full video here. When I was listening to it, the riff off scene from Pitch Perfect popped into my head; the one where they sing “Let’s Talk About Sex.” So I decided to do a mashup of it. I recorded my friend singing the word “consent” and added it into the riff off. I then added the part at the end using the title slides in Movie Maker.
Si Robertson once said, “It ain’t gun control we need; it’s sin control.” It’s true though what Si said. There have been people talking about to end gun violence. I wanted to do a PSA video about it. I thought after seeing a video assignment of making a PSA announcement and relating it to at least one of The Wire episodes this week, it would be perfect. I wanted to make it really great such as the minion in the GIF below making an announcement:
Well to do this assignment, I used a program called Wondershare and all I did was took some video clips from two of the episodes of The Wire we were supposed to watch this week (Season 3 Episode 8 and 9). Also I took the scene where Kima got shot. I got the plan to end gun violence video that I used for the radio show with the audio only. I mixed them together and created this:
Hope you guys enjoy it!
For this assignment a public service announcement was created. I had a lot of trouble thinking of what to do for this one. So a friend gave me the idea of creating it with this cow video.
Process:
I searched for this cow video that I saw a while ago with the running and jumping in the fields. I then uploaded it to iMovie and trimmed it. So then I google images of unhappy and abused cows, not a pretty sight but I kept is PG rated. So I placed those in front of the happy cow video, and added background music called Memorial.
Then I had to add title slides introducing the video and then I added questions before the sad and after, also I placed one at the end.
Hope you enjoy!
Without further ado….
After a long and…arduous journey the Don’t text and Drive spot I’m affectionately (and creatively) calling “Forget” is now in video form. There were countless snafus and issues but in the end I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I could tweak it forever. That’s the hardest part of the creative process…knowing when to call something finished…
This project was a lot of fun and originated with the Sound Effects story assignment. You can see my blog post about that here. Thanks to my sister Jen for volunteering to be run over for the common good. I think this also qualifies as a PSA Assignment.
Behind the Scenes
Basically this was a small production…my sister and I. It was shot on the Sony EX3, Canon 60D and Go Pro Hero3. The interior driving shots were shot against a green screen for safety sake and background plates shot with the Hero3.
One of the hardest visual effects shots to pull off believably has to be the driving composite. So tough to match the exposures so when the interior is properly exposed, the background is blown out and blurred appropriately. I think I did ok here. In the future I think it would be immensely helpful to have someone help shake the car while filming to give an more realistic sense of motion.
Also, due to circumstances beyond my control – the entire neighborhood thought it’d be fun to mow the lawn while we were filming, all the audio has been recreated in post using clips I recorded as well as clips from freesound.org.
