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.

[su_vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/141855097″]

I had donated plasma over the summer and had good experiences so I thought it would make a cool PSA video and encourage the city of Vancouver to donate as well. The only plasma center in Vancouver, WA is CSL plasma, so I decided to use their colors and main font in order to keep continuity between the video and local plasma center. My original storyboard and voice over script were changed significantly in order to fit the 30 second duration. I feel that this had an impact on the more simplistic and clean stylistic approach. I recorded the voice over using a MXL V67g microphone and created some of the graphics myself and found some creative commons graphics which I altered or added to, in order to fit my needs. I focused on animating shapes, text, camera movements and objects as opposed to character animation or environments. I made use of creative commons sound effects and music as well. I wanted the vibe to be happy so I found a song called “Colorful Spots – Upbeat Ukulele Background Music” by Nicolai Heidlas which was perfect, so I edited it to fit the 30 second duration. I loosely used a “circular timeline” to choose how to animate each shot to try to add more balance and continuity as a whole. The video came out very different than I originally imagined but I am happy with the results. I hope that this video encourages our local community of Vancouver, WA to look into donating plasma and helping out.

Sources:

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zCSe5_cCBg

https://freesound.org/people/JohnsonBrandEditing/sounds/173932/

http://freesound.org/people/Zott820/sounds/209578/

http://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/heart

http://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/hands

https://vimeo.com/141855925