SUNLAND : Video Messages Leave No Smokescreens

As cartoons go, the 30-second anti-smoking spot created by a group of Mt. Gleason Middle School students was one that could take your breath away.

“Everyone in the audience just gasped,” said Judy Winokur, an anti-smoking program coordinator for the school, in describing parents’ reaction to the cartoon during a preview. “It’s so hard-hitting.”

Last week, the cartoon was judged to be the best submitted by a Valley middle school in the Los Angeles Unified School District anti-smoking program, “Tobacco Education Awareness Messages 3.” Francis Polytechnic High School won the honor in the high school category.

In the program, 61 schools from throughout the district took part in a special two-day workshop in which a team of professional animators work with 150 students. The animators help the students, who break into groups of 10, work up ideas for a cartoon. Each group drew by hand more than 360 pictures that were filmed and transferred to video.

Wayne Whittaker, the anti-smoking coordinator at Polytechnic High, said that the cartoons were effective when he showed them to his biology classes.

“Anything done by a peer group works very well,” Whittaker said. “I showed all the videos that were made in this school to my classes and I think they had some impact.”

The video from Polytechnic High was titled “Prisoner of Deception: Who’s Next?”

The video begins with a woman in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask, and then flashes back to a shot of a slot machine, which spins and comes up with three cigarettes. Instead of money, boxes of cigarettes spill out. In the next scene, the heart monitor on the woman goes flat.