Activity 4: Your understanding of moving images (PSAs)

Public service announcements (PSAs) are advertisements meant not to sell a product but to encourage or discourage particular behaviors or to call an audience to action (to contribute to a political campaign or to recycle, for example).

Search online for the original 1980s “brain on drugs” PSA, sometimes called the “fried egg” PSA (see the image at the right). This PSA was shot from a first-person perspective. In the PSA, we are looking down as an egg is broken into a pan and begins to fry, while a voiceover says, “This is your brain on drugs.”

Next search for an updated version of the PSA released in the 1990s, starring then-popular actor Rachel Leigh Cook. In this ad, Cook is the narrator. Rather than a first-person perspective, this version is shot more typically—viewers watch Cook smash the egg and then destroy the kitchen in which she appears.

Why do you think each of these techniques was chosen? Which do you think works better? Would the impact or effect of the older PSA be different if it had been shot with an actor and as a scene? How so? Would the impact or effect of the newer PSA be different if it had been shot from a first-person perspective, as if the viewer were the person smashing the egg and destroying the kitchen?

What other advertisements—either public service advertisements or ads for products—have you seen shot from a first-person perspective? Were they effective? Why or why not?