Project 9: Visual Formats: Exercise 2: The Digital Campaign, part 2
I began by doing a mind map.
From this I decided that the best ideas to pursue were ones which easily suggest numbers, as I learned in my business training that numbers work well on social media. The area of long waits for help seemed like a good awareness raising campaign. I considered and rejected the idea about the same level of investment going into weapons for Ukraine and mental health services. Support for Ukraine is rightly strong, so I thought the campaign could backfire.
Having decided on a theme for the video I checked out format requirements for Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. They all had the same dimension requirements which makes it easy to create a product that will work across multiple channels..
I chose these three platforms because the campaign is aimed at working age adults.
I wanted to use multiple versions of the announcements that are often broadcast after programmes that raise sensitive issues, urging people to seek help if the programme has affected them. I wanted to intersperse them with flashed up information highlighting that help is difficult or impossible to get. However, I trawled through dozens of such videos but the recordings all ended before the announcements were made. In a sideways leap I came across a video that had a soundtrack and a plain white background onto which words would appear and disappear. I thought this technique would be useful in creating my idea if I could ever find the video clips to include with the simple written parts.
In a last ditch attempt to fund a suitable video I started looking for songs about help, the most obvious one being ‘Help!’ by The Beatles. In a moment of serendipity when something finally went right, I found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa4I3mr9jX4
The words are spoken by a variety of people against the backing melody of the song, with information in text about mental health support available on the NHS. However, the claims made are not in line with what’s happening in reality, in Sheffield at least. My idea to splice in the truth about available help was revived by this video.
I then needed to learn how to make the slides with words that appear and disappear. All the search results pointed me to PowerPoint. I don’t have that but I figured it could be done on Keynote so I opened it up and had a go. I was able to create the slides I wanted to and animate the text.
In order to create the campaign video I would splice in these slides one every few seconds so that the last slide appears just as the NHS video ends. I have invented a charity/company name and url as I don’t want to misrepresent any existing body. The figures I have are anecdotal, told to me by mental health staff if I was planning to upload this I would try to get written reference information for the numbers stated.
This has been both interesting and frustrating in equal measure. My approach was very much limited by available video sources and I had to change my idea when it became clear that I wasn’t going to find the content I wanted to use. I have no TV license so I was unable to search sites such as iPlayer. However, I eventually came to a potentially more powerful combination with the claims of the NHS video being called into question.
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