by T.A.G members Kris Toomey, Chris Fiske and Andrea Cimbrelo
T.A.G., Teens About Gambling, is an organization started by the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling and the North Brookfield Youth Center Jim Wuelfing , Prevention Director with the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling, and Marty Toomey, the Executive Director of the North Brookfield Youth Center
Recently, in the world of T.A.G., we have been working on a video for use at conferences and as a public service announcement. We hopefully can use this video in order to make teens aware of the risks of gambling. Of course, we are not making this video by ourselves. We are smart, but not that smart. The Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling has hired an expert movie editor in order to guide us in the right direction.
Peter Swanson has worked with many organizations, including the United Nations. In addition to working with the UN, he worked filming Rowan LeCompte in his journey of creating the stained glass window for the Washington National Cathedral. Peter is such a genius in video editing that these two prestigious organizations and many more have requested his expertise in the creation of their documentaries.
Peter has had to put up with us throughout the last four months. He helped us begin our video by brainstorming ideas. So, we thought about what we would like to include, and after a few long, long meetings we came up with our ideas and basic plan for the video project.
This then evolved into editing the responses of the teens who we talked with about gambling, and subsequently recorded last year. Editing these small clips took a very long time. However, thanks to Peter’s video editing device, it was made smoother than doing it by hand. Next, after the tiring editing process, we began to write the script for our video. Luckily Peter had picked up a small bunny in a hat like magicians use, which sparked our imagination. This then allowed us to create B.W. Bunny, which was our inspiration for the basis of our video. We decided that he would approve of what we say and inform us of facts about gambling. So, we wrote our script with B.W. as our mascot. It took us a very long time to write the script and review it. The script was then approved by Jim Wuelfing , the Prevention Director for the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling, with only a few errors. This then was brought to Peter who agreed that we had done a good job. So, we planned for filming in April.
Before we filmed the video, we thought that it was going to be easy. However, while filming, we realized it was not going to be an easy task. Peter had met us at our filming site, and we began to set up. We had originally thought that Peter would be using only a camera and green screen, but he completely surpassed our expectations. He had brought with him a camera that shot HD video, large tripod, portable green screen, four large lights that lit up the green screen from all angles, and an expensive, and fancy audio editing kit. When we had set up everything, we began to film after some minor adjustments of the lights.
The first person to film was Andrea. She was filmed by herself reciting her lines in front of the camera. We had filmed each line about four or five times until we got it perfect. Plus, we had filmed each line a few more times in order to allow us choices in our editing part. In doing this, the editing process is most likely not going to be easy either. After Andrea finished reciting all of her lines, we moved onto Kris’s lines. He had to do the same thing as Andrea, repeat each line plenty of times. Then, after Kris completed going through his lines, Chris went up and began to take his turn. He went through all of his lines as well. Following Chris, we had B.W. Bunny speak his lines. All of our turns had slight interruptions by the woman who lived above our filming site. We would have very small noises that would be picked up by the very sensitive audio equipment. The filming, overall, went great and exactly as planned. Actually, we finished in a shorter amount of time than we had originally estimated. This is as far as we have gotten as of now, but we’ll keep you informed as the process continues.
We hope this video we are creating will be used throughout the Commonwealth at schools and as a public service announcement for the general public. The video, we hope, will help teens to understand more about the risks of gambling, will be enjoyable to watch, and will keep this information with these teens for the rest of their lives.
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