Lynn English students win award for bullying PSA

LYNN – Their equipment is far from Hollywood quality and many of the performers and production team aren’t even old enough to drive, but students in the Lynn English High School TV Production course are already winning awards for their cinematic prowess.While there won’t be any Oscars or Emmys on the mantle in the school’s TV studio this year, the group’s recent third-place and honorable mention awards in the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center’s Public Service Announcement Contest are more impressive than any “best lighting award” handed out by a panel of movie experts.Taking on the glaring issue of bullying in schools, the group of 13 students crafted two 45-second public service announcements for the contest, taking home a third-place prize for a video on cyber bullying called “Everyone Gets Burned” and winning honorable mention honors for a video called “Say Something,” encouraging students to stick up for their peers who are bullied.Working with Virginia Keenan, who runs the peer mediation program at the school, the students in Ken Vorspan’s TV Production II class took time to learn the important statistics of bullying, added their own personal experience and came up with two ideas for PSAs to enter into the contest.”It was amazing to see how much time and energy was put into this,” said Keenan. “The teamwork they put in was amazing.”The “Say Something” video takes place in a classroom, where a student is persistently bullied by another student. Portraying a series of bullying acts that students see every day in school, the video’s message is that seeing someone get bullied and ignoring it is almost as bad as the bullying itself.”Obviously, being in high school we have all seen bullying and as students we see it a lot more than the teachers do,” said sophomore Eddie Martinez. “We turned what we saw into a short film.”While the first video examined the traditional physical bullying that has always taken place, the “Everyone Gets Burned” PSA focused on a more modern problem – cyber bullying.With the extreme popularity of social networking Web sites among teenagers, cyber bullying has become a serious issue across the country, even driving some students to suicide.More difficult to monitor than physical attacks, cyber bullying can take place for weeks without the victim’s knowledge as a bully can simply post a humiliating rumor on a Web site that spreads around the school in a matter of days.The PSA focuses on those rumors, showing how they affect everyone from popular cheerleaders and football players to the average student who may have made a few enemies.”It (the contest) is about showing the bullying that people are familiar with and also about showing the cyber bullying that can really affect lives in a big way,” said sophomore Caleb Michel.The students prepared for the PSA by working on another commercial project, recreating a popular Super Bowl advertisement in the school’s basement for practice.The students credit their work filming and editing a spoof of a Dorito’s Super Bowl ad with providing them the knowledge they needed to excel in making the PSAs.The 13 TV Production students will travel to Bridgewater State College for an award ceremony next week.