When we first reached out to the Brooklyn Center Community School (BCCS) about working with the students from the school in earlier Dec. 2023, they were very welcoming and open to the opportunity. We now work with their mostly high school aged students at two days per week, and have developed two topic tracks with the two groups.
One group is working on addressing the Anti-Asian Hate issues where we are currently working to produce a PSA (public service announcement) video. We went over the topic and talked about the historic incidents in the US, as well as the current situations. We then introduced the students to some different forms of videos that we could do to make people aware of the issues. We watched some videos of different styles, and talked about the processes of production for each including planning (preproduction), production, and editing (postproduction). After deciding on the testimonial PSA format, following the style of one of the examples produced by students from the UCLA, we then have the students discuss in doing some researches to come up with the questions they want to ask for the participants. The students also recruited some members from the Asian Students Club. We also discussed the elements that we would want to have in a PSA – education to make people aware of issues, suggestions of actionable steps, and resource and contact information. We’ve also decided on including a symbolic drawing for the video that the students will create to help with the visual interests.
The other group is working on the topic of substance abuse. Currently we are focusing on the harmful effects of vaping, and the group is also in the process of finishing up a video. One of the reasons in making this video is also to enter it into a PSA video competition for high school students on the topic of vaping. After watching some videos examples and some discussion, the group decided to write a short skit to highlight how vape makers target young people to start vaping by making attractive flavors to entice young people to start.
Both Video PSAs will be debuted in earlier April, please follow AMA facebook for the most updated info about these two youth-led videos, and how our young people share these timely issues with their peers.
