An interesting question...

Filming a PSA is hard. 

It’s easy to think of a concept for a PSA, however it’s incredibly hard to think of a great concept for a PSA because, most of the time, PSAs are often heavy-handed or very cheesy.

For my Media Production class we had to film a PSA for a client. My group’s idea was strong, but executing it took a lot of time and patience. Adding music, the first time, made the 30 sec. PSA look like an SNL video short, which was NOT what we were going for at all.

Eventually we had luck though with a music track, and not to sound entitled, but I think we deserve a bonus mark just for that manhunt.

However, a lot of PSAs do miss the mark, and while ours was salvaged and the music complemented our final product, I can say, without a doubt, it’s effin’ hard and I commend the people who do it on the regular.

One PSA, which has definitely stayed with me since I watched it, has to do with bullying. The PSA from France asks, ‘why is bullying okay in schools when we would never condone it in the workplace?’

What an excellent question!

The mentality that ‘kids will be kids’ is an incredibly detrimental notion when compared in ‘Le Monde en face : Harcèlement à l'école’.

It’s an amazing commercial that everyone should watch, especially those who go to school and those who teach in schools, too.

Some of the scenes in the PSA are hard to stomach, but for some kids in school, this is their reality and yet, if this happened in the workplace it would be dealt with by HR and the perpetrators would be fired. 

What we need is an HR department in schools. 

What do you think?