PSA Assignment

Subject: Gun Control PSA Analysis

Attached to this email is the Gun Control PSA I created for the upcoming web campaign. In the following memo I will be explaining the intended audience, justifying my creative choices, and recommending possible changes.

Intended Audience

The PSA’s target market is everyone who has been affected by the epidemic of school shootings; this could be students, faculty, and anyone with a loved one in the previous groups. The target audience is the individuals who are hesitant to enact gun control legislation. The PSA focuses on this group in particular because despite the countless school shootings, many government officials and voters are reluctant to act. This legislative standstill is due to the belief that school shootings are not prevalent. Or these individuals are too far removed from the tragedy to truly empathize.

Creative Choices

The initial idea for the PSA was to quash any doubts the targeted audience—gun control holdouts—had about the frequency of school shootings and create immediacy to those who have experienced it. Like most Internet campaigns my PSA is short, simple, and jarring in order to maximize its impact. I will be elaborating on the following sections of my creative choices:

· 911 Calls: I chose to use clips of real 911 calls from previous shootings because the raw fear and desperation in each caller’s voice creates a haunting effect. The PSA uses only seconds of each call and play them in rapid succession. This is designed to overwhelm the audience, in order to further draw attention to the high frequency of school shootings.

· Simplistic visuals: The simple black background and white letters symbolizes the seriousness of the issue by providing a stark image to complement the 911 audio. I choose to list the name of the school, location, and date to authenticate that each call was from a different shooting. The blurred transition from one shooting’s copy to another implies that they occur so often as to be interchangeable.

· Insanity definition: The closing of the PSA with the clinical definition of insanity was meant to provide an intervention-like feel. The zooming-in motion of the text is meant to overwhelm the audience as “insanity” approaches. This contrasts with the stability of the next image in which the PSA offers its solution.

Possible Changes

Possible changes I would make to the PSA would involve visuals and length. I originally intended to use a volume visualizer but I could not find a free program on the Internet. With a volume visualizer the audio would be displayed as waves that fluctuated with the changes in volume of the caller’s voice. This would have provided a stronger visual because it would emphasize each tremor and shake in the caller’s voice. I would also have liked to add more 911 calls but there were only a handful that have been released. This would have extended the length of the PSA and increased effectiveness by further overwhelming the audience by the sheer number of school shootings.