Audrey Gyolai

Driving question: How can we, as agents of the MCIS Advertising Group, Inc, create an effective advertising campaign that influences American citizens to get involved in a worthwhile cause or change their attitudes and beliefs on a social problem?

Audrey Gyolai:  I think the best way to engage people in our ad campaign is to get them to emphasize with people that are suffering from stress. If people and especially teenagers are able to emphasize with our campaign ads, then they will become more aware of the stress in their lives and the stress that the people around them undergo. Therefore they will be more able to identify when they need help and when people around them need help managing stress.

 

The first media tool that I utilized was GIMP. GIMP is a tool that utilizes several layers of media to create and alter images and text to create a seamless product. I was able to collect pictures and to remove the background so that the image would be outlined on the solid background I selected. I used the fuzzy select tool to quickly select the background area. Then I used the eraser tool to closely edit and trim around the picture. I also used a blur tool to help eliminate the fine lines and the sharp corners around the outline of my image. I began messing around with GIMP before the start of the school year this year because I was in charge of designing and printing tickets for the Homecoming dance. I had heard about the program from one of my friends that had taken a graphic design class. For me, the simple act of creating a red rectangle was daunting. During this project, I greatly improved my GIMP skills. I went from knowing essentially nothing to being able to scan and digitalize a freehanded design to create a snapchat filter.

For my digital media, I used an iPad and iMovie to film and edit my documentary. I filmed my video on the iPad, then I transferred it to a Macbook Air so that I could edit it on iMovie. I trimmed the videos to remove irrelevant content and added text slides over the video so that the questions I asked could be read onscreen while each interviewee was speaking. iMovie permitted me to vary the volume during parts of the video, allowing me to account for varying volumes.

The value of learning to use media creation applications as a 21st century learner is that media helps us demonstrate our knowledge and share it with others. As we scroll through our phones or commute to work, we are constantly exposed to media. Media has become a central way of communicating our thoughts and feelings with others. In fact, media is allowing many people to quickly and efficiently inform themselves on issues and to acquire new skills. Infographics may be used to demonstrate concepts in a visually appealing manner. In the span of a few seconds, a reader can visualize data with help from infographics. In contrast, videos travel farther in depth on a subject; this allows individuals to learn complicated topics on demand. Youtube channels such as Crash Course, Minutephysics, and Kahn Academy allow anyone to learn topics as diverse as Quantum Tunneling or Latin Revolutions. Learning how to create our own media helps us put our own spin on the education process.

 

The first step our team took towards creating a unified campaign was to develop a message and to determine the best way to convey our message. We decided that we wanted to create a dramatic feeling for our campaign, and we decided on other aspects of our campaign in mind. Most notably, we decided that the majority of our campaign should be in black and white and that we should use the color purple to unify our campaign. We decided on the color purple because it represents peace. We thought it would contrast nicely with the dark and heavy black and white images. We discussed “cracking” under the pressure of stress and we tied the metaphor into our title font selection. We chose a font called “broken” that was all uppercase letters and had cracks through the font.