What If...

For this project we were assigned groups to work with. The people that were in my group include: Me, Maya, Chris, Will, Christa and Sean. The first thing we did was brainstorm ideas that are prevelant within any city, but in this case specifically Leeds. We came up with several ideas, with the most obvious choices being pollution, traffic, sexual behaviour and crime. Are discussing the possibilities at length we came to the conclusion that we would base our project on Sexual Behaviour. Therefore we all went away separately do do our own bit of research on this subject matter to see what we could find out. After searching the internet for a while it became evident that finding statistics on sexual beahviour specific to Leeds was hard. I managed to find quite a wealth of info regarding sexual health as a whole, but the statistics were from a few years ago and would therefore be no longer appropriate. We then regrouped and came to discover that everyone had had difficulty, due to this we then decided to move onto another subject that may be easier to research: crime. This did prove to be alot easier and information could be found relating specifically to Leeds. Using the direct gov website we were even able to find statistics regarding crime in our area by typing in any Leeds post code. Information provided included the number of incidents in the past year, if these crimes involved violence and if the number was up or down from the year before. When the group came back together we had to decide on a specific problem, not just crime in general, and the one that we came up with was male targeted crimes. We discussed that there are already campaigns out there that warn women of the dangers of walking alone, however these campaigns do not exist in regards to men. We felt this was shocking as many reported crimes in the Leeds area over the past year included male targets. We started to brainstorm ideas on how we could effectively deal with this problem and came up with the idea you see above; 'Ten Men'. It incorporated the idea that male mentality is often the problem in this situation. The majority of the time males are unafraid of the possible dangers that they may face and therefore we wanted to address this with a clever visual aid. Duplication of the male figure was how we wanted to visually engage the audience and draw them into the severity of the campaign. I started visually storyboarding the TV commercial for the campaign came up with the following designs. Obviously the drawings are rough but the ideas are there.

Below are the three design direction boards that we used to make our final presentation in front of the rest of the class. They briefly describe three points of our project that we wanted to communicate to our audience. The problem, the research and how we plan to deal with it.




Below are a few stills from a would be TV commercial for our campaign. It features a male 'student' walking down the street seemingly alone. Then all of a sudden more of him appear behind and before you know it there are nearly ten of him walking down the street towards the camera. The male appears relaxed, maybe he is even whistling, then all of a sudden a hooded figure appears on one side of the shot and before you know it this hooded figure is attacking our male 'student'. A fight ensues and the male is beaten up and left on the ground. The camera pans in on this unconscious male with all his belongings surrounding him, making it obvious that he is now all alone. Then our message of 'Stay in the Light' pans in and hopefully the correct message is communicated, without scraing our audience too much.