Huntington High School video arts students are busy creating public service announcements in the run-up to a series of contests they plan to vie in with their films.
“Teaching filming and editing techniques is only the first layer of the creative video program,” teacher Heather Swan said. “Teaching students to express themselves and their views through story telling is icing on the cake.”
Huntington art teacher Heather Swan.
Public service announcements or PSAs play a vital role in raising awareness of a wide range of important issues across the country and world. “Our students have chosen topics important to them such as bullying, distracted driving, mental illness, opioid misuse, mental abuse and proper social media postings,” Mrs. Swan said.
Students spent a considerable amount of time discussing and debating the focus of their films and feel they came up with a good sampling of interesting issues.
“Since these topics are so important, there are several PSA video competitions available for the students to enter our final videos in such as AAA Traffic Safety, Teen Drive 365, End Distracted Driving, Bully Prevention Center, Be the Voice 4 the Planet and Operation Prevention,” Mrs. Swan said. “As a little added incentive, all of these competitions have monetary rewards up to $15,000. Our Huntington High School video arts students always create amazing and inspiring videos.”
In recent years, Huntington students have won local, state, regional and national honors in a long list of video competitions. Many program alums have moved on to some of the best film schools in the country. Current students hope to continue the success their forerunners have achieved in public service announcement contests.
“Last year, Jack Glicker won the grand prize for the AAA competition along with several students receiving honorable mention awards,” Mrs. Swan said. “Even though we are only in our pre-production phase, I can already predict we will be submitting some incredible videos.”