Stay Safe This Holiday Season PSA

Trying to come up with a suitable model for students to refer to while making their public service announcements about mask-wearing was a bit challenging. I knew that if  I simply made a mask-wearing PSA, too many students will try to emulate my video. So, essentially, I was stuck between making a "real" PSA for a different topic, or taking a more entertaining route as we headed into winter recess. Yeah - I opted to have some fun and use my creation time to demonstrate how to add creativity using technology. And thus, I began creating a holiday "safety" video that focused almost entirely on holiday movie mishaps. In hindsight, it's obvious my PSA would be completely ineffectual at convincing even a single person to stay safe during the holidays; however, my real intention was to establish a festive and entertaining mood both for the upcoming winter break as well as what creating a PSA could ultimately become. 

In creating the video, it took a few days to grab all the movie clips I wanted, trim them, and sequence them to fit the beats of the rollicking version of "Ode to Joy" I had also trimmed from a YouTube clip. I decided to use Adobe Spark as the model platform for the students since it had the ability to allow collaboration and save everything in the cloud. Sure, it has massive buffering issues at times, and couldn't allow multiple music tracks as Windows Video Editor or other equivalent apps would, but it served me well enough. Despite it being a frustrating experience at times, each moment a clip fit perfectly with the song, I felt a sense of pride. I must have watched segments of my video dozens of times before moving on. Certainly, I kept thinking about what movies I was leaving out, if certain clips ran a hair too long, or if I should reorder certain scenes, but I had a deadline to push this to students before winter break. I would have loved to add the radio mishap from Mean Girls or found a more high-res version of George and Clarence being thrown out of Nick's Bar in It's a Wonderful Life, but I just ran out of time.

Using Adobe Spark "slideshow" had its ups and downs

I feel I could have done a better job with the words I chose as I simply opted to lift some lyrics from "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" to set the "ominous" safety warning at the start of the video. Still, having completed this video, I feel immense satisfaction for getting the timing pretty close to what I wanted.