Meiners_Paul_Project1

Posted on February 25, 2016 by 0alloldusers

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.

Jaymes: Low Income Housing PSA

Posted on February 24, 2016 by 0alloldusers

This short PSA asks viewers to support the construction of low income housing in the Vancouver area, and, indirectly, to reject movements intended to drive the homeless elsewhere. It came about after I noticed that I’d seen several news stories on the issue of Vancouver and Portland’s homelessness problem, many of which featured interviews with city authorities who all seemed to promise solutions in the form of stricter enforcement of loitering laws, the relocating of homeless camps, and generally sweeping the problem under the carpet instead of dealing with the underlying issues: the competitive job market (a national issue) and the lack of affordable housing (an issue near and dear to Vancouver, which boasts one of the worst markets for affordable housing in the country).

I was appalled at the idea that our political leaders were thinking of the problem in the context of “how do we get these homeless people out of our city,” rather than “how do we get these homeless people homes.” This short PSA satirizes this attitude by turning this metaphorical “sweep it under the rug” stance into a literal visualization using simple, recognizable icons. It points out just how ridiculous this “solution” looks in practice and drives home the point that thinking this way is no different from treating the homeless like litter to be swept away. My hope is that some of the people thinking of the issue this way will see this PSA and reconsider the way they have been approaching the problem.