Reflection on our PSA Production

This course -- EDLD 5363 Multimedia Video Technology, by far, has the most interesting (if not challenging) assignment of all the courses I have taken through Lamar University. I had to join a group and produce with them a 60-second public service announcement video, or PSA, on any topic of our choosing. I was lucky enough to be able to find group mates easily so that was not too much of a hurdle. The hurdle came up when we had to draw up a script. It was not that difficult for any of us to generate ideas nor to write a draft. On the contrary, it was quite a challenge to pick the best ideas and limit our script to fit within 60 seconds or less. Suffice it to say that we discarded roughly half of the original script, even though the resulting video was literally packed with information in the form of captions/subtitles.


On the production side, we were quite fortunate to have a Video Production teacher in our ranks. Needless to say, we exploited this and delegated the task of video direction and recording to him and his students. The resulting raw footage totaled more than 2 minutes long in 7 segments. 


Editing proved to be quite the challenge. It took two of us to perform this arduous task, and inspite of that, reducing our video to a minute was still difficult. Neither one of us had done video editing in any sense, so we really identified with the following quote from Desktop Video Guide:


"Starting out in video editing is tough. I know ... I've been there. Importing a video clip takes forever, you're confused by the video editing timeline, menus, buttons and all that jazz."


Armed with nothing but a graduate student's ardent fervor and CyberLink Power Director (after converting the MP4 video file to WMV with Windows Live Movie Maker), I was able to splice and trim the raw footage down to 1:08 and include subtitles to add content before I posted it for the other editor to apply his newfound editing skills using Sony Vegas as well as provide the voice-over narration. Despite our best efforts, we could not trim the video down to one minute... until today. It took two people and five days to trim eight seconds of video fat. 


After this ordeal, I have found a new appreciation for video editing and put Hollywood-caliber video editors up on the highest pedestal, and continue to be baffled at the celebrity status of mere actors.


Desktop Video Guide (n.d.). The various stages of creating a digital video. Retrieved from http://www.desktop-video-guide.com/video-creation.html

Copyright attribution:



Cyberbullying PSA by Treena Bell, James Days, Julio Gomez, Jeff Liwag, Lyndon Wang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORmfThjlVfg
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://wk3psa.wikispaces.com/.