My idea for this project came while I was hiking with a friend. We were up in the hills, and we came upon a viewpoint, but when we looked out most of the trees had been removed leaving hills of dirt in their place. I feel like often people don’t realize the potential danger to our forests if we don’t take more responsibility for them.

Rather than take a factual approach I chose to make my PSA more of an emotional journey. I thought this would be an issue where showing would be more powerful than telling. So I came up with a short story about a father taking his son to one of his favorite camping spots, and finding that the location has been deforested. Throughout the project I struggled with cutting each scene down, in order to get the whole video down to thirty seconds. I especially struggled with the text, which has to be on the screen long enough to read clearly.

To animate this project I used After Effects, which was a new experience for me. I would say most of the software was fairly intuitive making animation a simpler matter. The hardest part of the video to animate was the lip sync for the father’s dialog. To do it I made nine different mouths, and swapped them out every few frames to simulate speaking. This was a tedious process, but I am happy with the results. Overall I found this project to be a good learning experience, and I am happy with the final results.