Anti-Bullying PSA (school project)

[Adsolution]

Our Drama class was assigned a project to create a PSA (Public Service Announcement) video based off of fifteen different topics. Our (three-person group) topic chosen was... obviously... anti-bullying. The Drama teacher was holding her breath by the end with her eyes wide after watching our video. She said it was the best one in the school, and that they'd present it in front of the school during an anti-bullying assembly.

I was obviously ecstatic to hear this, but these are PSAs created by three students in a high school. I don't know if it's comparable to the ones done by the media, if it's really as good as she said it was. What do you think?



Also #1: the video's available in 1080p.

Also #2: Yes that is real blood on my hands.

Also #3: I was the first-person character at the beginning and end, and I directed, choreographed, filmed, and edited the video... with none other than the amazing... Window Move Maker.

[Matyuv]

It's great for a school project, well done. Nice choice of music, too.

I think it's a bit too long though, and the "bullying", as it is shown in the clip, would never lead anyone to commit suicide. It's not hardcore enough, so it doesn't really match the whole suicide thing.

What interests me is the numbers. 4400 (bullied students in Canada?) commit suicide every year you say, can you give me a link to where you're getting such stats from?

[Xenon]

A few problems:

1) The video has quite a lot of unnecessary padding. The action in it is good to see, but there are occasions where the guy is walking around and doing his own thing. The audience won't want to see this and their attention may drift.

2) The bullying you portray in the video isn't representative of 'bullying' as a whole. There was no physical confrontation, no name-calling and no public humiliation. It was just one guy demanding another for lunch money.

3) The part where the guy was preparing the wires was rather ambiguous. Camera control wasn't fantastic and it looked quite homemade and choreographed. I didn't really know what was happening until I saw the finished product.

4) People who feel suicidal because of bullying won't be able to empathise with the guy in the video. Noone would want to commit suicide because someone demanded lunch money. There should be more brutality and emotion.

Of course, these are but nitpickings. Overall the video is very good and the message it emits is pretty strong. It's certainly worth presenting it at a school assembly and I'm sure it would raise awareness of this issue. Nice job

[spiraldoor]

As Matyuv said, it’s good for a school project, but it is by no means perfect. I don’t know if you were deliberately going for the handheld camerawork (or ‘Cloverfield’) style, but I found the unsteadiness distracting. What’s with the abrupt shift to greyscale after the first couple of scenes? The editing could have been much better – the predominance of long takes gave the video the feel of something that was shot on a mobile phone, and the cutting is sometimes jerky and inconsistent. The direction was not particularly effective; the video overall was far too impersonal and emotionally distant to make the audience emphasise with the victim – there were too many shots of his feet, shots of his back, shots of him from obtuse angles or high viewpoints. We never really get close to the guy – we don’t even get so much as one good look at his face. The bullying itself seemed very mild – we get no sense of the bully’s cruelty or the victim’s isolation. There definitely should have been more than one bully. Giving the victim a friend who picks up his shoes for him was a mistake – it undermines the supposed suicide-inducing misery of his life even further. It would have been ideal to film in a school realistically bustling with students – the completely empty hallways and locker corridors are highly improbable. The instances of bullying are too lengthy and too few – why not show us the victim being bullied in, say, three different places at three different times in three different ways, for about thirty seconds each? The suicide scenes were a bit over-the-top difficult to make out what’s going on, and what’s with the bleeding hand at the start? Are the bleeding hand and the wire at the end part of two different suicide attempts or something?

I could probably go on, but yeah, this is pretty great for a school assignment. Everyone you show it to will probably be impressed. I wish my school made us do projects like this. I imagine it’s great fun.

[Adsolution]

Thanks for the crits.

About the editing: We only got 3-4 days to work on this project. If we had more time, I probably would have been a lot more careful and put more work into the overall quality.

About the empty corridors: It unfortunately took twenty-two takes of the same scene for the running away in the hallway scene because people wouldn't listen when I say "ignore the camera." Silly kids.

Also since it was during school hours and it's a private Catholic school (sucks to the private Catholic school), it's difficult to make a scene like what you described without attracting unwanted attention despite it being a film.

But I'll take your crits into consideration because I probably wouldn't have thought of a lot of those.

[Sabertooth]

Unlike my friends, these guys can keep straight faces during video projects. Bravo.

[Adsolution]

Unlike my friends, these guys can keep straight faces during video projects. Bravo.

Lol, you should see what they were doing in the previous takes of each clip. To get them to act without laughing I had to pretend I was having a heart attack for a second to freak them out (even though I'm the last person who'd ever get a heart attack).