Behind the scenes of my final project. The story I created came from my strange obsession with urban planning and my heavy opinions on car dependency. The message is a little on the nose, but it’s something I thought needed to be said.

I was least excited to do the visual and design assignments so I decided to do them first. I made a city graphic poster for Breezewood, PA. For that I found the least flattering picture of the real Breezewood with a sky (not very hard to find) and added an extra layer of clouds above the already existing sky. Next I added some text in the sky and painted over part of it with a transparent brush to create a foggy effect.

Next I made a propaganda poster. Propaganda posters are typically clean and elegant so I made some geometric shapes to show roads. I made one of them blue to show a “blueprint” where another lane could go. Finally I added large, bold lettering that had “patriotic” undertones. The result was a little underwhelming but was something that worked well enough.

I then got to work on a newspaper cover. I made some fancy curves next to the title and drew black rectangles to divide the various writing. I carefully chose fonts and practiced spacing on the cover. This was probably my least favorite part of the project as the text felt dense and meandering.

For the design portion, I last made an event poster. This turned out much better than I was expecting. I carefully chose a color scheme that felt inviting but also professional, similar to how a town hall meeting should feel. I used the geometric selection to create shapes of a wind gust and a bullhorn. The bizarre font used combined with the pastel colors almost gives a 70’s vibe, strangely enough.

For the audio section, I told a first-person story. I recorded myself on my phone. To add a second voice, I recorded myself talking again. The first voice was the narrator. The second was the narrator’s boss talking through the door. In Audacity, I added a knocking sound effect from Freesound and added sounds of cars driving by. I then added the second voice and muffled it. Finally a cleaned up the audio and took out unnecessary parts. This is the portion I am probably the most proud of.

Finally, I tackled the video segment. I decided to have a conversation with myself. I filmed the two different characters in 2 different angles. Doug Lahey is on the left looking up, showing he is not in control and is in a negative space. The city council member is standing up and looking down from the right, indicating a high position of power. I used continuous shots for both of them. After recording them, I split each piece of dialogue into separate clips in iMovie, allowing the back and forth. To show one character interrupting another, I split the audio and video from a clip and made the audio cut into the next scene. This added anxiety and uncertainty into the video. I also added an ominous droning noise at the end to show how hopeless things were for Lahey. Finally, after cleaning up the clip transitions, cleaning up the audio, and adding the intro/outro, I uploaded it onto YouTube. This project definitely took the most time, but it is a video I’m fairly proud of.