Students’ videos to spread message on drugs, alcohol
A young woman dressed in black strides toward a cemetery as a flashback shows multicolored pills spilling from a vial into someone’s hands. The woman places a red rose on a gravestone and walks away as a female voice says, “It only takes one.”
This video – produced by a 10th-grader at Coeur d’Alene High School – recently won a top prize in the Real Teens, Reel Change contest, run by Kootenai Alliance for Children and Families. The nonprofit corporation works with community partners throughout Kootenai County to help fund drug and alcohol prevention programs.
The contest asked young people to produce short videos with drug and alcohol prevention messages. The top prizewinners’ videos will be professionally produced by Case42 in Otis Orchards. The completed videos will run before movies at Riverstone Regal Cinemas in Coeur d’Alene this month through September.
“I was thinking about something that got right to the point and was really impactful,” said Lauren Pinney, 15, who created the cemetery video. Pinney said she wanted to show that drugs are easily accessible and that death or addiction can result from just one experience.
Alliance Director Tammy Rubino said the nonprofit plans to hold the contest every year. She hopes big-screen exposure will attract more entries. She received 15 entries this year.
“Some of these kids put a huge amount of time into these,” Rubino said. “Some of the videos were almost to the point where you could show them as is.”
The videos highlighted death from overdose, the dangers of drunken driving and peer pressure to drink or use drugs. The grand prize winner, “Oncoming Storm,” shows a TV broadcaster bracing against the wind as she tells the audience about a devastating hurricane hitting America. Storm footage rolls behind her.
“The storm has hit America, and it has been raining beer for three days now. Flash flood warnings have gone into effect. People have been asked to stay off the streets to minimize lives lost,” she says. As the camera pans out to show planet Earth, a young female voice asks: “If you could stop an oncoming disaster, would you?”
Mirena Sharpe, of Post Falls, produced that video with her friend Gabrielle Lewis. “We were thinking about Hurricane Katrina and how much devastation that caused,” Sharpe said. “We were thinking about comparing the devastation of drunk driving to the devastation a hurricane causes.”
Dave McClave, Shane Baldwin and Kale Hauge of Case42, a video production and multimedia company, worked with the students in North Idaho and Eastern Washington settings to produce the videos. Case42 donated most of the time and equipment to professionally produce the videos.
The experience made Lewis think more seriously about video production as a career.
“It’s something I’ve kind of always wanted to do,” the 18-year-old North Idaho College student said. “It’s one of those hobbies lingering in the back of my head. It’s nice to have an opportunity like this to be able to practice more and get a feel for how it works.”