The assignment is to advise a creative concept for a safety video about pedestrian rules for children under age 7.
The Communication Problem:
Young adults and teenagers do not know or understand how Vicious the addiction of nicotine is and do not realize how serious the health hazards are. They may have some information, but it is probably not organized and arranged into a conclusion. Even though packaging carries warning signs, they do not heed the warning or take it seriously.
The Target Audience
Our target audience is primarily young adults and teenagers with a secondary audience of older smokers.
Demographics: Our focus is an age group between 14 and 21, sometimes not well educated, and often from lower socioeconomic groups. We may have to consider targeting the younger or older end of this audience as the primary target.
Psychographics: The young think they are immune to the health hazards and to the difficulties of addiction. They dismiss the legal warnings. They might think that smoking is cool or a way to WRITING FOR VISUAL MEDIA demonstrate maturity. The audience will not accept a lecture and is not really impressed by statistics. They are responsive to images of their own lives. We have to show them in a scene that matches a plausible lifestyle for them.
The Objective
The objective is in part informational, to convey further information about the hazards of smoking. It is also strongly motivational, to shift the attitude of the target audience and make them start thinking and start worrying. It is to haunt them with troubling images that won’t go away. It is only through the motivational shift that the possibility of an indirect behavioral outcome can occur.
The Strategy
The strategy is to create a little sexy vignette with romance and style that does not reveal itself as an antismoking PSA until it is too late for the audience to disengage. They respond to it piecemeal until they are stuck with the conclusion. The logic must be visual, not verbal. We use powerful special effects derived from contemporary fantasy horror films (such as morphing) to reveal a sequence of aging, sickness, and death from smoking-related disease. The reality is like a bad trip or a hallucination.
The Content
An attractive young man and young woman are in the kitchen after a date sharing a beer and a cigarette.
The Medium
Our message is primarily visual. The message needs close- ups and depends on special effects that are easy to do with video. It could not be conveyed by audio only for radio, nor for a static medium such as a billboard. The medium necessary to convey this message 9 mins left in book 13%
WRITING FOR VISUAL MEDIA
Is television. This idea exploits the visual potential of video and television.
The Concept
We are going to involve the audience in a familiar scenario of a date but with a difference. The character is going to hallucinate and see
the inside of a kitchen refrigerator turn into a morgue draw showing a corpse. He acquires X-ray vision and is able to see the damaged lungs of his date and the transformation of skin damage happen before his eyes. The abstract medical consequences of smoking are made graphic and physical to our audience.
From the concept you can pitch the solution to the communication problem to the client. Once it is agreed, you can elaborate the concept as a treatment that narrates in chronological order what happens on screen.