Synopsis for the final video

The Show Ponies initiative, ‘The Hungry Hearts Campaign’, issued a TV advertisement about youth homelessness in Queensland in a joint venture with Mission Australia.

Within our advertisement, we adopted various visual techniques that we believe will capture and draw the viewer’s attention to this ongoing issue within our state of Queensland.

There is an underlying theme within our television advertisement of red and black. It not only compliments both Mission Australia’s corporate colour of red, but also the carmine heart of the ‘Hungry Hearts’ logo.

We adopted the film noir concept of red on shades of grey from the filming techniques of the 2005 movie ‘Sin City’.

Our graphic media design team de-saturated most of the images to make sure the audiences' eye is drawn to the single red-hued objects in each frame. We chose everyday items such as pants, footwear and hats, as these are everyday items that people often take for granted and don’t value. We purposefully did this as we wanted to exemplify that these ‘everyday’ items to one person are the basic essentials to the homeless youth of Queensland.

During the middle of our advertisement, we added a ‘dreamy’ old film overlay where it goes from black and white to colour. This has been purposefully done to show that this is what homeless children want. They want a normal ‘colourful’ childhood with playgrounds and freedom however this is not their reality. Rather, their harsh reality is that they have no beds, no blankets, no food and no love.

The song choice is I, Monster's 'These are Our Children'. We chose this as we believe it had powerful lyrics that complimented the message we wanted to get through to the audience. We purposefully positioned the aforementioned dream sequence at the same time as the lyrics of “close your eyes” to illustrate that is a dream to the homeless youth. After this short sequence, the images go back to the reality of black, white and grey demonstrating that the reality is that the dream is nothing more than a figment of hope, unlesswe do something about it.

The shots change then to that of the tunnel and subsequently on to photos that we took of where the homeless youth of Queensland really live, before suddenly changing back to colour with the poignant pictures of skinny young girls and the “I need you” line to capture the viewers attention back to the pressing need for them to act on this terrible and increasing issue of today’s society.

note: We had recorded voiceovers for the video, however Windows Media Player only allows for one audio stereo track to be used and therefore we could not use the material.


- Philippa