Date: November 27, 2010
To: English 1311 Students
From: Anthony Duong
RE: Pill Popper
I chose to approach my PSA as a fictional video diary of a boy who took prescription drugs with added text and information. I also added music that fits the topic of drug addiction, with strong lyrics such as “the drugs begin to peak…sedation changes to panic and nausea and breath starts to shorten and heart beats get softer.” The added texts are facts about prescription drug addiction. I use this to emphasize the growth this community problem as well as the logos aspect of persuasion. I used myself as the boy mainly because many times seeing peers of the same age have more impact on the audience. This makes the message more personal and plays well with pathos. As credibility goes, I site everything that I have used and even put copyright and fair use statements within the credits of the video. I may have slightly hurt my own credibly by using myself as the pill popper but I did not show myself taking the pills.
One of the main problems that I had when I was making my PSA was choosing how I was going to present my PSA. I didn’t really know how to approach the assignment, I only knew it was going to be a video. After a couple of hours of brainstorming I finally made the decision to do a video diary. The next obstacle that I faced was taking all the information I had and compressing it into a thirty second or a minute video. I had so much information that I thought it would be impossible. I some how managed to pick one sub topic within my information and expand on it. On decisions pertaining to design, I wanted to have some slides of pure text so that it would have a better impact on the audience. As well as some slides with both text and pictures to emphasize the problem that is presented through the text. I knew I didn’t want the PSA to be just pictures with text so I chose to put video in the PSA. In decided to go in the abusers perspective with the video and came up with the video diary idea.
Discourse conventions and audience played a large role in my decisions for the PSA. Because the PSA would be presented in an academic setting I had to keep the text professional. My peers know very little about my information so I have to keep the information very brief and to the point. This makes the video easier to understand and conveys the message more effectively. Knowing this I focused on making the pictures with the text emphasize the urgency of the community problem of prescription drug abuse and overdose. I believe that these pictures are the most effective aspect of the PSA because they convey the problem very well and have logos and pathos influences in them.
Here is the link to the PSA:
http://vimeo.com/17298727
