For my last term of school for one of our classes, we had to create our own assignments based on what we actually wanted to do in the future. We were able to have a few extra options in case a couple didn’t work out based on scheduling, the iffy Vancouver weather for location shoots, etc. One of my ideas, which ended up being one of those projects I never ended up shooting, was to create some kind of poster or bullying awareness campaign. It would be a series of kids faces showing just their eyes to focus on the emotion, representing a statistic of bullying. It was still in the back of my mind to do this at some point, but I didn’t really think about it for quite awhile. Then, before the holidays, I had met up with my friend Megan, who is a graphics designer, to talk about doing some collaborations. I mentioned a long list of projects I eventually wanted to shoot, including my idea about the bullying awareness poster. We went over a lot of ideas that day and decided on a couple to work on. This was not one of them. It was only a day or two later that Megan called me up and asked if I wanted to work on this anti-bullying idea, for an actual event. Turns out, her friend is friends with the producer of the movie After Lucia, a film delivering an unflinching example of the high school bullying phenomenon at its worst, and needed a poster designed for a presentation at UBC about bullying awareness that he would be showing his film at.
Bullying is a huge problem, and I didn’t even realize just how many students were bullied online until helping create this poster. 1 in 4. That’s 25% of students who are cyber bullied. That is a huge number of kids! I think events like this should happen more often to help create awareness of this serious epidemic.
