My PSA is a picture of a road in the middle of the woods with burnt trees everywhere. A woman is walking on that road with a green dress that is on fire, and the sky is all red with a large dim clock behind all the trees. The tagline is just above the woman and it says, “You can’t buy time”. This all means that the world is on a timer that we keep shortening with the way we live, like emitting lots of carbon dioxide. The woman in the picture symbolizes mother nature, and her dress on fire symbolizes the urgency of the situation humans put her in. The reds in the picture represent urgency and danger because the targeted audience is people that are passive about climate change, and the green of the woman’s dress makes her appear more like mother nature.
I made this PSA by planning it out in my notebook at first, and then driving up to Big Basin to take photographs of the burnt woods up there. I ran into the challenge of the road being closed, so I couldn’t actually get to the trail I wanted to take pictures from. The way I worked around this was by taking pictures of the road where it wasn’t closed, because the trees were still burnt on the side of the road. I chose my favorite picture and put it into Illustrator, applying a 16 color image trace and deleting all the sections that had the sky in it. After that I made the clock, I lowered the opacity of it, and placed it behind the trees but in front of the sky gradient rectangle that I had made. I drew the woman in and made the text layer after that. For the color of the text I chose a brighter red than the sky to make it readable and have it stand out more. I applied a drop shadow to the text and then that was it.
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