CHATSWORTH : Students Work on Anti-Smoking Videos

To the ranks of anti-smoking activists add students at Chatsworth High School, who have produced a series of animated commercials to combat the popularity of smoking among their peers.

More than 100 students, many of them smokers, watched the fruit of their work projected on a screen at the school Wednesday. The 30-second spots were conceived and drawn by students and assembled into videos by a Topanga Canyon animation company, hired through the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The best of the videos will be shown in health classes and entered in a districtwide contest, health teacher Sheldon Fried said.

The students laughed and clapped as they watched their hand-drawn cartoons dance, tumble and metamorphose across the screen.

Some of the teen-age smokers who worked on the videos said they decided to quit in the course of the workshop. Others shrugged their shoulders.

“I’m not afraid to die,” said Josh Waters, 18, a smoker who nonetheless helped produce a video called “Smoking Is Hell.”

The commercials included short cartoon segments accompanied by such slogans as “don’t be a fool by letting donkeys rule” in a film about peer pressure, and “don’t train yourself to smoke” in a video depicting a giant cigarette tooling down a railroad track.

Stephanie Brenke, 16, who quit smoking when she started the program, said a majority of her schoolmates are smokers.

Monique Alexander, 17, agreed. “I know a girl who smokes because she thinks it’s sexy,” she said. “It’s stupid, but people think it’s cool.”

The program, funded by a federal grant for preventing smoking, has been in middle schools for several years and made its debut in Los Angeles high schools this year. Students are taken out of health class for two days to complete the workshop with the help of animation technicians. They work in groups to come up with ideas and draw the 340 separate pictures needed to create a 30-second animated video spot.

“It’s a different approach--the students become the teachers,” Fried said.

“It’s not like just telling them not to smoke,” said Darion Jones, the animation specialist who guided the project. “When they work in teams, the kids turn to the ones who smoke and say, ‘Ick.’ It’s peer pressure.”