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TEEN TRUTH OVERVIEW
The level of violence in schools has reached a scary extreme. In the past eleven years over 350 youth have been wounded or killed in school shootings around the world. As a result these shocking tragedies have shattered 1000s of students’ lives, their families and communities. Experts study the occurrences, while newspapers and magazines write about them, but very few adults give youth the opportunity to discuss why school violence happens. TEEN TRUTH was developed to do just that, to give students from different racial, social, demographic and economic backgrounds a chance to express each other.
In 2000, one year after the Columbine High School massacre, five diverse students from across the state of California were each given a video camera and a challenge, to illustrate the truth about being a teenager. They were each given tapes, instructions on how to operate the cameras and the freedom to document anything they felt could give further insight into issues they struggle with during adolescence. Over the course of nine months and under the guidance of director, Erahm Christopher, each teen filmed their friends, their families and themselves in a personal style that challenged their thoughts and feelings. Throughout the course of the project the students were instructed to complete personal journals and conduct impromptu discussions with their peers about the complicated issues confronting adolescents. In the end, the 100 hours of collected footage clearly illustrated the truth about being a teen.
Christopher partnered with Producer JC Pohl and recruited an aspiring teenage editor to assemble the footage into a rapid firing, lyrical documentary that has been acknowledged as a necessity for every student, parent and teacher struggling to understand the social problems associated with bullying and school violence. Since then the film has evolved into a series that Christopher and Pohl hope will truly illustrate the opinions, problems and frustrations with issues that teenagers face every day and ultimately inspire, motivate and empower other teenagers to make a difference in the lives of their peers.
In just under two years the TEEN TRUTH series has grown into a multimedia organization focused on creating “intertainment†that reaches youth on a unique level. The first two films in the series, TEEN TRUTH: BULLY and TEEN TRUTH: DRUGS & ALCOHOL are distributed to the educational market by leading educational distributor HRM Video. Each film is packaged with a 35-page curriculum and is estimated to have reached over 500,000 students. In addition, Christopher and Pohl created TEEN TRUTH LIVE, a motivational speaking series around the films that focuses on encouraging students to be proactive about the issues discussed in the films. In just twelve months, the TEEN TRUTH LIVE series has touched the hearts of roughly 100,000 students and educators from California to Montreal, Canada.