This project had two main goals from the outset: to create a visually interesting and high-fidelity animation, and to draw attention to a cause which was both local to the Portland/Vancouver area and still personally important.

With this in mind, I chose a cause near and dear to my heart – the Columbia River Crossing. Having commuted into Portland for the entirety of my high school career, the growing congestion in the Portland metro area, specifically on the Glen L. Jackson and Interstate bridges was always somewhat confounding, especially given the fact that a good chunk of it could be alleviated simply by extending light-rail lines into Washington. With this in mind, reviving the CRC was an obvious choice for my PSA animation.

The animation itself was quite straightforward and stuck extremely closely to the initial storyboard, although there was some fine-tuning and re-recording required for the audio to strengthen the ‘call to action’ at the end of the animation.

From the outset, the plan for asset creation was to use illustrator to create all assets. This was for two distinct reasons. First, working in illustrator guaranteed that all assets would be vector-art, allowing for them to be scaled with no loss in fidelity. Secondly, using illustrator for all assets forces a consistent, stylized look, which pulls all of the assets together in any given scene.

Overall, I feel that I was quite successful in achieving both of my goals from the outset of the project, as well as overall creating a high-quality and persuasive PSA.