The process of creating the Ad Campaign
Research into Ad Campaigns:
When creating my social awareness campaign I wanted the message to be clear throughout. I began to look at different campaigns and found this website:
The campaigns that stood out most to me were:
These stood out the most to me because I felt as if the message was clear and concise, they were all very straight forward and almost uncomfortable to look at. This is what I wanted to achieve with my work.
With all of my Ad Campaigns, I used Adobe Photoshop to create them. I am quite familiar with using this program so using it wasn't really a challenge. Anything I didn't know I used YouTube tutorials to help me figure out what I wanted to do. The first thing I wanted to learn to do was to actually change the colour of skin. I followed this tutorial I came across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO7gq_2BvZw
First Draft
The first draft I completed and showed in my supervision groups did not translate well from the feedback I received - earlier mentioned on the Supervisions page.
Many people understood the angle I was taking on it, but others also wanted the shock factor to be more, they suggested that I should add some disturbing side effects of skin bleaching to get my point across. Although, they said they understood the stance I was trying to get it was they could still see the beauty in it, which is not what I am trying to promote.
I then had to return back to the drawing board so I returned to my research and looked at what I could do to make my message clear to the audience.
With the ad campaign I decided after the crit that I was going to create billboard campaigns, so I had to really look into what kind of billboards I wanted to create. There are so many examples of billboards and through this research I realised I wanted to create billboards for underground tube stations. I came to this conclusion because through my research I realised that the issue of colourism, is not really spoken about meaning that not many people know about it. I found this through my group supervisions, not many people outside of the black community are aware that this problem even exists.
I began to look at where social awareness campaigns were usually placed and how effective it would be to promote my social awareness campaign in these places.
I found this on underground advertising. This appealed to me the most because I thought of my own experience when travelling, and when travelling underground I find myself really paying attention to the advertising because there is no signal underground so you are really forced to take in your surroundings.
I used folders to categorise my work because I ended up having so much to refer to.
When creating my second draft, I decided that I wanted to use portrait photography so I started off by looking at different styles of portrait photography because my main focus was going to be on the face.
I began by wanting to have my portrait photos in black and white, but soon realised that in order to have the shock factor this would not be possible, because the aim is to really emphasise the colour of the subject's skin:
I then created a second draft based on these photos:
I liked the idea in picture number .4, of having the background colour being a shade of brown. So i used this idea in my own work but made the colour the same as the skin tone of the model. I realised I needed to really bring the shock factor so I researched the effects of bleaching and found some disturbing images that I felt that I could use to really represent this.
I used the exact images and isolated them by removing the background so that I could manipulate them and make them look like scars on the models face. I used the selection tool and magic eraser tool.
This was my second draft:
The feedback I received from this draft was that it was still too appealing to the human eye, that it just looked like a piece of art and there was no shock factor to it.
I then returned to the drawing board and thought about how I cold make it shocking to look at and send the same message. I thought about adding some bruising to the image as the scars start off very sore and leave discolouration marks on the body.
Here is my 3rd draft:
I discovered the burn tool, which was a BIG help. The feedback I received from this image was that although it is shocking, the message they got from it was that it looked more like the model had been beaten up rather than bleaching her skin. The discolouration should be more distributed around the face.
This is when I toned it down and came up with my final product:
After finalising my ad campaign design I then looked into getting it to look as if it was actually on a billboard. Using the perspective warp tool in Adobe Photoshop I was able to manipulate my image to make it look as if it was actually in the billboard. Here are some before and after shots of the billboards:
The Final Product:
