characters

 After writing the rough draft of the development of the plot for the ad I began to roughly decide the characters that will feature in the ad. Due to the nature of an emotional approach to advertising we feel that by choosing stereotypical characters we will be able to get our message out to our young target audience because teens would have similar relationships with their own parents, friends and teachers.

The character who we will call victim, for now, represents a teenage girl who has committed suicide due to serve online harassment from one of her school peers who will also be featured in the plot. Our group is unsure weather we should remain our victim nameless or name the character whom the other characters are addressing. If we name the character we do add personality to the character and put a name to the now dead main character. However if we leave the character nameless our audience may relate further as this would become symbolic of all teens who have killed themselves as a result of cyber bullying.

The victim was a teenage girl in high school between the ages of 15-17, the same age as our target market. The character was cyber bullied and took her life as she felt the pressure was too much to handle.  This loss of life has dramatically affected the lives of her loved ones who unfortunately noticed the change in her personality but did not take action to help.   

The bully is represented by the character Jenna the classmate of the victim who harassed the victim online after being caught bulling the victim at school. Like many of the attitudes of  bullies, Jenna justifies her actions by joking around and that she wouldn’t have physically hurt the victim and that the victim overacted to the situation. As a consequence of her actions Jenna now has a criminal record and her job opportunites have diminished. Jenna seems very remorseful of her behavior and encourages other ‘bullies’ not to make her mistake.

The friend of the victim is also featured in the ad, she is the same age as both bully and victim and represents those teens ,who know about cyber bullying situations and do nothing. The friend feels very remorseful and blames herself for not taking action against the harassment.

The teacher of the girls is also featured, she represents the schools which have a duty to keep students safe against all forms of bullying and harassment. The teacher is very sympathetic to the situation she acknowledges her wrong doings and admits she had intentions to speak to the girls parents but never got around to it.

The last character is the mother of the victim, a very emotional character who is stricken by guilt and feels she should have been more involved in her daughters life. The mother character is similar age as the teacher and obviously from the older generation who may not be aware of what cyber bullying is.

Jasmine x

Script development

Amazingly writing the script was much easier then I suspected, I began with a rough draft plan of how we wanted the script to develop,

·      Introduction of characters and basic plot

The introduction of the script will mainly derive from the dialogue in which the characters set the tone as they recall the account of the focused incident. The characters will discus the incident of cyber bullying in their own words and how the incident has affected their lives and out look on cyber bullying. The characters represent those who are directly affected by cyber bullying to portray how cyber bullying affects communities not just the victim.

·      Further information, background to characters and characters role in the incident

The background information will be delivered by the characters who will recall how the cyber bullying began and the change of behavior of the victim.  The characters will not directly introduce themselves but their role in the victim’s life will be made clear through their own dialogue and the dialogue of the other characters.

·      Reactions to incident from characters

As the plot develops the role of the characters in the incident becomes clear, and the lack of action taken by those who were involved is in focus. This is important to the development of the message of the ad as without necessary steps to stop cyber bullying the issue may become worse.  These character reactions are all quite similar as all characters are plagued by guilt and remorse of not taking action against the issue.

·      Conclusion, character speaks directly to camera and links ad to campaign and website

The conclusion of the ad is quick and is when the characters acknowledge the audience and speak of the dangers of cyber bullying, relating the ad back to the campaign and asks the audience to take action if they are aware of any cyber bulling by going to the website and finding further information of the campaign.

Jasmine x

Advertisement

In order to keep our video related to our campaign Sherly and I have decided to create an advertisement video which we can use on the website of our campaign. We feel by creating an advertisement for the campaign in COM416 we can link this project to the requirements of COM415 which will ultimately benefit our project and overall course mark.

After deciding to create a short ad our group has brainstormed as many possible angles we could approach. We feel due to the nature of our campaign topic, cyber bullying, we should use an emotional approach, which will appeal to our target audience and hopefully make our audience consider their own online behavior. 

The ad itself will consist of four characters, the bully, the friend, the teacher and the mother of the victim. As well as this the fifth and unseen character, which the other characters will be discussing is the victim of the harassment who has committed suicide as a result of online bullying. This may seem very depressing and dramatic, but our group feels by presenting the most serve consequence of cyber bullying we can portray how serious cyber bullying is as a social issue and how important it is to change the public attitude of teens when using the internet.

Jasmine x