WHS students create film about bullying

Last week, a New York City filmmaker from the Don't Wait to Unmake a Bully Project, Mike Fuerstein, led students at Wahkiakum High School through the process of script writing, acting, staging and film production as they created their very own anti-bullying videos.

Josiah Romines looked on as students filmed on Friday and talked about his experience the day before.

"It was a lot of fun," Romines said. "We tackled depression and anger and how people respond to it in our video."

Romines enjoyed the hands on experience. The students were not only allowed to handle the cameras and the lighting, they ran those things during filming. He'd learned a lot about lighting in the time it took to film their sequence.

Allison Kirby was an actor in another video. She and another student, Kirstan Manganelli, were using the stage fighting skills they had learned earlier this year from the Seattle Shakespeare Company to create a scene.

"It was so much fun," Kirby said.

Kirby was still excited about the experience three days later. She spoke animatedly about the process, from the script writing to the fake fight, from the makeup done by classmate Tarah Wisner to the process of putting the film together shot by shot.

Students from Audrey Petterson's ninth and tenth grade Honors and English classes and Ron Cox's Rhetorical Communications class participated. They created three videos, which will be professionally edited by Fuerstein's colleagues, according to Kirby, and will eventually be shown on Youtube and http://www.dontwaitproject.org.

Students will be able to watch the completed 90 second films at an assembly at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year.

The program was sponsored by GEAR UP and the Wahkiakum Community Network.