What may start off as school assignments can often lead to great things.

In March, a public service announcement video submitted through Benicia High School’s Friday Night Live Club— the local chapter of a statewide organization aimed at promoting healthy lifestyles among teens by preventing alcohol, tobacco and substance abuse— won first prize for a PSA illustrating the impact of tobacco use. The PSA actually had its roots in a video created for a health assignment.

Freshmen Augustina Apodaca and Katie Han wrote, produced and acted in a video together for Dean Gor’s health class. The video depicts a young woman in a dystopian future where cigarettes have caused a lot of environmental problems and wiped out nearly all species on Earth. Apodaca said the idea was to put a different spin on a topic that had often been addressed.

“I was trying to think of something that not a lot of other people would do,” she said. “I was thinking about what would happen in the future, and then it came to me to do a dystopian type of video.”

“I wanted to kind of scare someone who would be smoking,” she said. “I wanted to give them the cold, hard truth.”

Gor suggested the video change its focus from attacking smokers to the cigarettes themselves. As a result, the second draft was almost completely changed. The final product begins with a disclaimer that cigarettes kill more than 6 million people each year and goes on to depict a future where the rate continues and only one person is alive to deliver a testimony to the cigarette. The entire video is set to a dark rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” with vocals sung by Han, who also did a lot of the filming.

“We wanted to find a song that had meaning that kind of reflected the opposite of what our video is,” Apodaca said.

The revised draft of the video was submitted to the Solano County Office of Education and Solano Youth Coalition’s Tobacco Use Prevention PSA contest through Friday Night Live, which Apodaca and Han were both members of and which Gor serves as faculty adviser. The video won first place in the high school long video category, scoring a victory for the club and filmmakers.

Apodaca was pleased to see the video get the recognition it did.

“I put a lot of work into it, and it really gave me hope that I can do more things,” she said.

The video can be viewed online in a playlist at Solano Youth Development’s Youtube channel at Youtube.com/channel/UCUlIfCmC12ji3ndqXAuxIOQ.

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