BSA National Service Territory Award
Last week I attended the Capital Area Council’s board meeting where I was invited to speak about my Eagle Project to Scout leaders throughout the CAC. I was excited for this opportunity, as I would like to see my film promoted and shown at troop meetings throughout the CAC. When I was introduced, I was also pleasantly surprised when Jon Yates, the Scout Executive of the Capital Area Council, informed the audience that my project had also been selected for the 2022 Glenn A. and Melinda W. Adams National Eagle Scout Service Project of the Year Award for the National Service Territory covering Central and South Texas and all of Louisiana. I had already been selected by the CAC for the council award amongst 400 Eagle Service Projects this year, and I don’t know how many more projects are included at the territory level, but it must be in the thousands. This is an amazing honor to receive in addition to speaking about my film Shining a Light on Teen Vaping at the board meeting. I hope that this additional recognition will continue get the word out to Scout leaders to show the film to more BSA Scouts.
First School Showing
I was excited that the first school showing of my film Shining a Light on Teen Vaping was at Hill Country Middle School, which I used to attend. The multi-purpose room was full of 8th graders at the end of their school day. I was worried whether the film could hold their attention for 30 minutes, as 8th graders can be a tough audience. Happily I watched them laugh at the funny parts and listen carefully at the serious parts. Afterwards we had a Q&A session for students to ask questions. Charlie Gagen, the Director of Advocacy for Texas from the American Lung Association helped me answer the more technical questions. Having support from the ALA is amazing! Mr. Gagen also attended HCMS and Westlake High School 15 years before me, so it was even more surreal for him to be back in the multi-purpose room again. I hope to do more school showings soon!
BSA Eagle Scout Service Project Award
This weekend I went to a reception at the Capital Area Council’s Fickett Center to listen to keynote speaker Burton Roberts talk about how Scouting has influenced his career in television production, which interests me. This was also an opportunity to see my name engraved amongst the other class of 2021 Eagle Scouts on the Eagle Wall outside the Fickett Center and to receive a limited-edition Eagle Scout commemorative challenge coin. That was more than enough honors for a Saturday morning, so I was surprised when Jon Yates, the Scout Executive of the Capital Area Council, called out my name to receive the Capital Area Council’s Eagle Scout Service Project of the Year Award. This award is given each year to one of many Eagle Projects completed across 15 counties of Central Texas, so it was a huge honor for my film Shining a Light on Teen Vaping to be selected. I hope that this award will help to have the film shown at BSA Troop meetings across Central Texas.
More from Austin American-Statesman
Thank you to Sarah Asch and the Austin American-Statesman for the article last week on my film "Shining a Light on Teen Vaping" and working with the American Lung Association, American Heart Association, Capitol Area Council, and Westlake High School. Please read it here: https://www.statesman.com/story/news/local/westlake/2022/01/07/westlake-student-partners-american-lung-association-against-vaping/9129981002/
Big and Bigger News!
The American Lung Association is promoting my film Shining a Light on Teen Vaping! If that isn’t big enough news, they want me involved with their campaigns to reach more teens! The ALA has many helpful programs, such as Not on Tobacco (NOT) for teens who want to stop vaping or smoking. They also have a program for schools that want an alternative to suspending teens who are caught with vapes or cigarettes. Suspension does nothing for teens already addicted, so Intervention for Nicotine Dependence: Education, Prevention, Tobacco and Health (INDEPTH) is a program for schools to provide support and education for these teens. I would like to see more education for teens BEFORE they choose to experiment and then get hooked. This is the audience for my film, so working with the ALA is an exciting opportunity to reach more teens. Check out their interview with me here: https://www.lung.org/blog/teen-vaping-dangers-documentary.
Another Film Festival!
I am honored that Cult Movies International Film Festival has selected Shining a Light on Teen Vaping to be included for their third season. I am blown away that my film has already traveled across the pond to the UK!
Check out all of their selected films here.
First Newspaper Article!
Nicole Villalpando interviewed me for her article published today in the Austin American-Statesman, which you can view here: https://www.statesman.com/story/news/healthcare/2021/06/21/austin-boy-scout-makes-educational-video-vaping-teens/7677133002/. I thought she explained the goals for my Eagle Scout Service Project and the key elements of my film Shining a Light on Teen Vaping with great clarity. I was also happy that she included stills from my interviews, so that the stars of my film get some press too. Shout out to Ana, Beah, Ernesto, Ja, Julie, Liam, Shelby, and Trinity!
First Film Festival Nomination!
I am shouting out to our neighbors up north. No, not Dallas. Nope, not even Oklahoma. I mean the “Great White North,” otherwise known as Canada. O Canada!
The Phoenix Shorts Film Festival in Toronto has selected my film Shining a Light on Teen Vaping as a “Nominee”. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Honestly, I am not sure exactly what that means yet, but this is one super excited American realizing that someone in Canada has watched my film and liked it. I hope Phoenix Shorts spreads it across Canada like a Chinook. Wouldn’t that be nice, eh?
Sorry, that’s my best Canadian impression for now. I have French Canadian roots through my paternal great-grandmother, so I really should do better, but hopefully I can visit Toronto soon.
First Press Interview
Hank Cavagnaro at Austin's ABC News channel KVUE put together a great news story about my film Shining a Light on Teen Vaping. This is the first press interview I have done for the film: https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/west-lake-teen-creates-film-to-highlight-dangers-of-vaping/269-72d90445-cf76-40d5-bc4f-9d5ea55eb1ad#_=_.
I learned a lot from this experience. I was worried that I rambled a lot in my answers to his questions. Afterwards I thought I could have done so much better if I had a second chance. Then seeing how Hank expertly edited my interview with footage from the film to tell his story about my story in a compelling way was inspiring. I was really happy with the result.
You Want to Quit, But How to Begin
This is a great question, and I am certainly no expert, but I will take a shot at answering. I have included links to resources on other websites and videos, which hopefully can help. Another good place to start is here. What I know from my research for my film and from talking to friends who vape is that quitting is a struggle, particularly once you have developed a nicotine addiction. Nicotine is crazy addictive! To be honest I was surprised to learn that it is more addictive than illegal drugs that I assumed were way more addictive like heroin and cocaine. You may not believe you are addicted, but here are some typical warning signs…
You feel anxious when you want to use your vape.
You have tried to quit but failed and went back to vaping.
You think about vaping when you are busy doing something else.
You still vape after getting in trouble or knowing it is bad for your health.
In other words, if you want to quit vaping, you may want to assume that you have some level of addiction already, so you need to make a serious plan for quitting. When adults decide to fight an addiction, they can find a lot of professional help available. But when you are teen hiding your addiction from your parents, you are at a unique disadvantage. I think trying to quit vaping on your own and without the help of your parents is inviting failure. You need every tool at your disposal, and that is unlikely without help. Also many common therapies to quit nicotine are either not approved yet for teens or are only available through a doctor. In some ways, the deck is stacked against you as a teen trying to break an addiction to nicotine.
Ask yourself whether you think your parents will be more disappointed when: (a) they catch you vaping, (b) they find out from someone else, (c) they find out when you end up hospitalized with a respiratory illness or other health problems, or (d) you tell them you messed up and need their help. Of course your parents will be disappointed in each of these scenarios, but only the last one gives you the power to address your addiction on your own terms. By showing your parents that you are willing to admit your mistake and want their help, they can move them past the initial shock so you can work together on a plan of action. Give them a chance to help you.
With your parents’ support and professional resources to help you quit vaping, you can be successful. In all cases, you need a solid plan to quit before you begin and a team of supportive friends and family.
Recruiting, Casting Calls and Scheduling
Recruiting was easier than I expected. I am in Westlake Theatre and Westlake Improv Troupe, so it was like fishing in a stocked pond with many talented friends jumping at the chance to be on camera or help with production. For recruiting middle school students for their group interview, I had to rely on my younger sister Katie for casting. Because all of the students were minors, I also had to get releases from their parents. I appreciated that their parents trusted me with such a sensitive topic.
The pandemic changed my plans to shoot larger group interviews inside classrooms. Because I shot over Zoom instead, I reduced the group sizes so I would not have many tiny heads on the same screen. We experimented with using Zoom where each person talking automatically takes over the screen, but it was too distracting and lost the reactions of the other interviewees. I also wanted to present a diverse set of students for both group interviews, and limiting the group sizes made casting decisions more challenging. In the end, I was very happy with our casting results.
I then learned that scheduling students as volunteers can be extremely challenging. Everyone had very busy schedules, and all it took was one interviewee to cancel at the last minute to keep pushing out our filming dates. This was particularly difficult with the middle school students, who had less control over their weekend schedules. Eventually I got everyone together, and we recorded a lot of interview content.
I did not give the interviewees my questions in advance, except for the anonymous interviewee, as I wanted very natural reactions and responses from the group interviews. If I were to do it again, I would have provided more direction about what to do and what not to do while someone else was speaking. For example, we got a cameo appearance from Ja’s dog while Ana was speaking, which was funny but I hope not too distracting. There was no way I could ask Ana to try a second take at her stream-of-consciousness answer, which was so genuine and funny. Although most of the educational content is in the explainer video segments, my goal was not to educate teens about vaping from only one teen’s perspective (mine), so without all of the teen volunteer helping either in front or behind the camera, the film could have been a bear to watch. I also believe that some of the most valuable education in the film comes from listening to students talk about how they avoid vaping when it is offered and the experiences of the student already hooked on vaping.
What I feel is missing from a lot of anti-vaping content targeted towards teens is simply hearing teen voices confidently say they do not want to vape and they are comfortable saying “no, thank you” when asked to vape. These firsthand perspectives from teens is what I hoped would be uniquely useful to watch and more engaging than many educational videos about vaping that I found online.
Whac-A-Mole and Teen Vaping
While producing my film during the pandemic and attending high school over Zoom, I have been asking myself a few questions. First, will teen vaping decline as a result of the FDA’s ban on fun-flavored JUUL pods? Second, will the thought of damaging their lungs scare my friends away from vaping as each new wave of COVID-19 hits our community? Third, with so many teens not attending school in person, will their friends and dealers be able to get more teens to try vaping?
Sadly there is more bad news than good news. The good news is that the most comprehensive annual survey called the National Youth Tobacco Survey indicates that early 2020 saw the first ever decline in teen vaping, although it was only by a couple percentage points. The survey was conducted from January 16th to March 16th of 2020, so any impacts of the pandemic and school closures had yet to begin. It could be that the FDA’s ban on flavored pods that teens prefer was beginning to slow down teen vaping. Maybe education and news stories about the dangers of vaping were also having an effect.
Now for the bad news. The survey also captured a new trend as teens reported using more disposable vapes—where the whole device is disposable—which means they were beginning to switch away from JUUL as stores ran out of JUUL’s fun-flavored pods. The survey also reported that current teen users most frequently vaped flavored disposables like fruit (82.7%), mint (51.9%), candy/desserts (41.7%), and menthol (23.3%). Because of loopholes in the regulations that only targeted disposable and refillable cartridges, these disposable vapes quickly filled the gap left by JUUL.
New disposable vapes like Puff Bars have been taking over the teen market during the pandemic. They have even more fun flavors and are cheaper than JUUL. The FDA was caught flat-footed, because during the pandemic they suspended in-person inspection activities, like retail compliance checks and vape shop inspections. Instead, they send warning letters to Puff Bar and at least 10 other companies in mid-2020 to stop selling and distributing flavors favored by kids after the FDA finally closed the loophole in the regulation. Interestingly, Puff Bar seems to have changed ownership a couple of times, and no one seems to know who is in charge.
You might think that in the last 10 months, supplies of these banned products would have dried up. They have not. I just heard from a freshman who told me that Puff Bars are everywhere at her school, and she thinks that more than 50% of students attending her school in-person are vaping. Students are using face masks and social distancing requirements for bathroom occupancy to hide their vaping, while teachers and staff simply do not have time to play cat-and-mouse with vapes, as they are struggling just to educate students safely during this very stressful pandemic school year.
Finally Live on YouTube!
I pushed the film to the public link on YouTube today. Shining a Light on Teen Vaping is now live for all to watch! I feel relieved, elated, and anxious at the same time. This has been a much longer journey than I expected, so there is a huge sense of relief that I have completed the project. I am elated with the positive response from those who have already viewed it privately. At the same time, however, I am anxious about how it will be received by a broader audience.
I am already realizing that if I want to re-watch the video, it is better for me to do it with someone who is watching it for the first time. If I am alone, I can get hypercritical and feel the need to make more changes; however, when I watch it with someone else, I focus on their first-time reactions, which is much more rewarding and distracts me from second-guessing my decisions. I used to think it was odd that some actors and directors say they will not re-watch their own finished work, but I understand them better now.
I hope people will enjoy and learn something from the film, particularly kids in middle school and high school.
Creating the Opening Credits
I have been asked a few times about shooting the opening credits, so I will explain it here. My inspiration came from the beginning of Friday Night Lights where they film shots from a moving car and use handheld cameras without an expensive gimbal to give it a shaky, real-life, documentary feel. My vision was to start at a more rural high school and then travel from outside of Austin into the city, and then to my suburban high school before finishing inside my school in a bathroom with kids vaping.
The first shot is of the old football stadium that was actually used as the Panther’s home field in Friday Night Lights outside of Austin, so that is an Easter Egg for fans of the show. Then we shot a ton of footage out of the window of a car over several days to get just enough usable footage of traveling from that field to my suburb of Austin. Then we shot driving by my old middle school and finally my high school. Because of the pandemic I had to replace my idea of shooting in a crowded hallway leading into a school bathroom. Instead I decided to end similar to how I began with a shot of our stadium, but then panning to a group of actors huddling together next to the bleachers and pretending to buy vape pods. Of course the actors were wearing face masks, so we tried to angle everything so that you do not see their masks, and then the video blurs out to reveal the title.
Another Easter Egg was that the actor in the middle brought her backpack from BSA National Youth Leadership Training without thinking that it might not be cool to show a Scouting backpack in the shot with her pretending to deal vape pods. Instead, she used it as the bag they are huddling around, so I guess you could call that a very well hidden Easter Egg for my BSA friends.
Composing Original Music
I struggled for a while about what music to use in the film. I thought about sampling the music from the opening credits of Friday Night Lights, but I was not sure how to get the rights to it and I thought that it might be too heavy-handed and distracting to viewers that are fans of the show. I also listened to a bunch of instrumental clips online, but nothing really worked. Then my dad asked me why I did not compose something original. I have been taking piano and guitar lessons for several years and more recently have been studying composition, but the idea of composing my own music for the film had not occurred to me. I played a few of my original compositions on piano while watching the opening sequence on my phone. One of them had the right tone, and with a few changes in timing and transition could fit well with the quickly changing shots in the opening. For the closing credits, I composed another piece that fit the change in mood I was looking for. I recorded both pieces on my Yamaha keyboard with my iPhone.
Sound is Super Difficult!
When someone asks me what was the hardest part of making Shining a Light on Teen Vaping, I think they expect me to talk about the research about vaping or story boarding the film or learning to use post-production software. Honestly, these were the main areas that I was most nervous about before I started work. My answer, however, is recording sound.
I am in my third year of theatre class at Westlake High School, and I have acted in many plays with Westlake Theatre and performed many times in our improv troupe WIT. It has been an amazing experience with a wonderful and inspiring teacher in Ms. Yanchak and so many talented classmates, who I enjoy spending time with. While this has also exposed me to set design, costumes, makeup, lighting and sound, it all seems to get done magically around me by a team of my peers with boundless energy, who are invisible to the audience. I have good friends who have focused on the theatre tech side and others who take film classes, but my focus has always been performing. I knew that taking on producing this film would be a big challenge even with the help of these friends with more experience behind the scenes.
I tested out several microphones for recording my narration of the explainer videos and draped my room in blankets to simulate a professional sound room. That was the easy part. I had planned to shoot my live audio/video narration in a controlled sound environment, but the pandemic made that too risky. Instead, I decided to shoot these parts outside at my school, but I had no idea what I was in for. I could make an hour long outtake video of stopping mid-sentence as a motorcycle roared by or we threw stones into trees to get loud birds to fly away. If you listen carefully, you will hear a bit too much wind, leaves rustling on pavement or birds chirping in some shots. We even tried shooting the audio and video separately with the camera on a tripod and my iPhone poking out of my pocket to record sound. Will Ashcroft spent many hours syncing up the separate audio and video tracks, but I did not like more than half of the best takes. Also, since that day of filming, I finally got a haircut my mom had been begging me about, so it would have looked strange to just reshoot just some scenes and lose continuity. So we left all of that work (apologies to Will) on the cutting room floor… digitally speaking.
Once we had everything we wanted to use, there was still a lot of audio to manipulate. Volumes were distractingly different between my scenes or even amongst interviewees in the Zoom recordings, so we had to manipulate volumes and try to smooth out distracting noises. Finally, for the interview of my friend who vapes, I wanted to be sure that his voice could not be identifiable but still understandable. There are a lot of voice manipulation effects available in Final Cut Pro, and I tried all of them. Eventually I found a combination of effects and manual settings to alter his voice enough that I could not recognize him but I could still hear what he was saying. It required that he speak very clearly, so it lost some of the informal quality of the group Zoom interviews. Given the more serious tone of the interview, I felt that it was more important that his story could still be heard with enough clarity even if it lost the casual tone of the other interviews. I also gave him the questions in advance, so that he could be prepared to articulate his answers with clarity.
In the end, I gained a lot of respect for the work that sound crews do, particularly when shooting on location.
It’s Always Sunny in… Austin
Shooting outdoors comes with a lot of lighting challenges, even when it is just me talking to the camera while sitting at a picnic table. A perfect day on the lake where the sun is shining can produce terrible lighting conditions for filming. I learned that clouds are my camera operator’s best friend. For example, when the sun is shining behind me, the background is washed out and I look like a shadowy figure. When the sunlight is to one side of me, I look like a less dramatic version of Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face villain in The Dark Knight. When the sun is shining directly on me, I look like Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Our first attempt at shooting on location had perfect lighting conditions, because the sky was completely overcast. I was not really aware at the time that this defuse lighting was just dumb luck. Unfortunately, I was not able to use any of the footage we shot for other reasons, such as sound problems. When we tried again, the sky was only partly cloudy. At first, the sun was behind clouds, so the lighting was soft and diffuse. We shot some good footage and moved quickly to different locations around the school. But when the sun came out, everything went wrong. We found a large sheet of plywood to hold up next to the camera, so that at least I was not washed out in sunlight. It sort of worked, but I could not stop squinting. We decided to give up and try again another day.
Then, while driving home, a large group of clouds rolled in, so we made a u-turn and drove back to the school. We double-timed it to get back to the location of our last shot. Now the lighting was perfect, so I focused on getting a good take with my lines, as we still had two more scenes to shoot. Fortunately the clouds conspired to help us. After we finished the remaining scenes, we hustled back to reshoot the opening narration scene under the big tree outside of our theatre department. The lighting had been decent but not perfect before, so I wanted to try again. Of course, now that the light was perfect, there were tiny but very loud birds in the tree above me and a few young kids shouting on the nearby field as they played touch football. My camera operator asked the boys if they could play quietly for a few minutes, which they were happy to do, but there was no negotiating with the birds. A few stones thrown into the tree did the trick, although I must state that no animals were harmed during this movie! We finally got the retake I wanted, so we thanked the kids for their help, packed up and left excited to watch our footage.
Filming During a Pandemic
I proposed this project to my BSA Troop before the pandemic started. I had visions of shooting inside schools and conducting group interviews inside classrooms. Everything changed in March 2020. At first I figured that I would have more time to plan. I still needed to do a lot of research about vaping, create storyboards for the film and recruit classmates to help with production and to be interviewed. While all of these things took a lot more time than I anticipated, by the summer it was clear that the pandemic was not going away anytime soon.
I had planned to attend an academic summer program, which was cancelled, so I changed to a virtual program on documentary filmmaking. Meanwhile I had to change every location I had planned to shoot. Since our classes had moved to Zoom in the Spring, I experimented with how we might record group interviews using Zoom, instead of within classrooms. I reduced acted scenes to just the three kids huddled together by the stadium, as trying to shoot scenes inside school hallways and bathrooms was not going to be safe. I also increased the length of explainer videos to provide more educational information without acted scenes.
While filming during 2020-21 was uniquely challenging, I hope that the film is still compelled to watch. My primary goal was to create a film that speaks to teens with teen voices, and although the pandemic forced me to adapt, I feel that the film’s voice hits the mark.
Research, Burns, and Moore
I did A LOT of research on vaping. I have probably read more about vaping than any other topic I have studied in high school. Some of it was very interesting, but a lot of it was either confusing or boring. But I suppose that if you really want to learn a topic completely, you have to read everything you can find. I knew that I would have to boil it down to only the most useful information in order to keep an audience’s attention while still educating them. However, if I only scratched the surface in my research, I was likely to miss key points in the narrative or—even worse—get facts wrong. There is a lot of misinformation about vaping online, so at times I could find myself reading someone’s blog or watching a video that said the opposite of something else I had read. It was frustrating at times.
Since the film was my Eagle Scout Service Project, I had to report the number of hours I spent on various tasks as well as the hours spent by others who participated in the project. I did not keep a running log of the hours I spent researching, and I am sure that I underestimated how much time I spent online doing research.
Partly for inspiration and partly to motivate myself, I also watched a lot of documentary films during the period I was researching about vaping. My favorites were Ken Burns and Michael Moore, who have very different styles and topics. I love how they each tell a story, which is so compelling and entertaining while also so educational and enlightening. Neither seems to leave any stone unturned in their research, whether it is Ken Burns breathing new life into history or Michael Moore exploring and exposing hypocrisy and corruption. These filmmakers must come to work very prepared, and they inspired me to keep learning more about my topic until I felt that I knew more than enough to build my narrative. When I felt stuck or lost motivation, I would ask myself “what questions would Michael ask” or “what other images or vignettes would Ken look to unearth?”
Thank You, VideoScribe!
I want to give a shoutout to VideoScribe for making great software. I have watched a lot of explainer videos online, but before learning about VideoScribe, I assumed that only professional graphic artists could make white board animated videos. VideoScribe was so easy to learn how to use just by experimenting and playing around.
Adding little bits of animation and simulating writing on a write board alters a boring slide presentation into engaging video. My film has almost 8 minutes of video created in VideoScribe. That is almost a third of the whole film! All of the dense and complex educational information is presented in those 8 minutes. I have to explain what benzoic acid is, discuss survey statistics, and talk about FDA lawsuits. Without VideoScribe I would have been stuck with two unappealing choices: 1) remove a lot of important educational information or 2) accept that most people my age will use my film to cure insomnia.
I previewed the film before the final cut with several people of various ages from middle school to my grandfather, who is a retired professor and university dean. I like to watch reactions to specific parts of the film and see where engagement is high and where it wanes. Although I sprinkled in some live shots during my narration of the explainer video segments in order to help keep viewers attention, most people instinctively lean in more during the explainer videos. My grandfather was blown away that I could create this kind of animation on my own, as an actual white board was an innovative classroom tool when he was teaching graduate students. More importantly though, everyone seems attracted to animation regardless of age. Even when it is just a disembodied hand drawing a chart or dialog bubbles popping up over a vape pen, the animation seems to engage people to listen to my narration.
Thank you, VideoScribe!