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.