For my Public Service Announcement, I decided to focus on bringing awareness to mental health, and more specifically, emotionally connecting with your loved ones more often. In my PSA, there is an image of two people reaching for each other’s hands, with their arm and hand wrapped with a wire around it. The wires on each person’s arm are supposed to connect but don’t. My idea for the PSA is that we are often with people that we love and care for, but it doesn’t mean we are emotionally connected with them. The wires in the photo represent emotional connection, and not having them connect, gives the feeling that the two people aren’t emotionally connected. I hope to inspire people to be in touch with their friends and family more and to bring more connections between them. For the PSA, I chose the colors blue and orange as they are complementary colors and blue represents calmness and peace, while orange represents warmth and feelings.
To start the PSA, I began by using an orange extension cord to wrap the two arms and hands starting from the forearm going down to the hand. The orange color contributed to the color scheme which made it easier when it came time to edit the photo. Next, I made my two subjects reach for each other’s hands but ensured that the two outlets weren’t connected to help push my message of the PSA even further. A problem I did encounter was attempting to fit the hands and the disconnected plugs all in one photo all while trying to only get a picture of the hands. It took multiple attempts, but I was able to get a good angle by lowering the height of the camera. Then, I opened the photo in Adobe Photoshop and cut out the image of the hands so I didn’t have to worry about the background. Then I opened the cut photo into Adobe Illustrator, which I then used my color schemes to create a solid teal blue background, and I image traced the photo to bring out the orange tones in the photo. For my tagline, I decided to neatly handwrite it as it would give it a more homemade feel it and could give me more choices to explore with the handwriting.
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