This past spring I had the opportunity to work with the El Paso County Health Department, in partnership with two local high schools, to create an anti-tobacco media campaign. It was an awesome experience to work with a group of high school students to help them share with their communities their commitment to avoid tobacco products and instead pursue healthy choices.

The campaign had multiple purposes:

• Provide a platform for high school students to tell their stories about making healthy choices versus using tobacco products
• Deliver a message to the local city council encouraging them to pass legislation discouraging the use of tobacco by youth
• Create media products — through photography, video, and audio — that could be distributed through different channels in the school and community

My role in this project included meeting with two groups of students over the course of about five weeks to help them develop their corporate and individual messages, to assist in shaping the creative direction for the visuals, and to help design and produce the photographs, videos, posters, and audio clips for use in a variety of media channels.

Due to the short amount of time I had with the students from each school, and due to the compressed production schedule, I provided the students with some basic parameters in which they could create their campaign. Despite extremely busy schedules filled with classes, homework, and extracurricular activities, I was very impressed with the students' excitement for jumping into the process, embracing the time and creative constraints, and producing some great messages and visuals. With a desire to focus on the "positive" of making healthy choices over the "negative" of how tobacco hurts you, the students chose to highlight, as individuals or as small groups, healthy choices that they were making in their lives versus using tobacco products.

One group of students that I worked with was from Manitou Springs High School in Manitou Springs, CO. We had an extremely limited time to meet — twice a week for a little over 30 minutes each day. About 13 students would dash in over their lunch hour, work on their messages/visuals, and then turn around and head back to class. I was encouraged, but not surprised, to see the students' excitement and commitment to the project. They created some great messages and visuals. Below are the messages they developed:

• We are Manitou. Who are you? (This was tagline that the students chose for their project)
• I choose art because tobacco doesn't give me a breath of fresh air.
• We choose to win, because with tobacco you lose every time.
• We choose traveling over tobacco because it takes us places.
• I choose an active lifestyle because I live without filters.
• I choose creativity because tobacco is cliché and redundant.
• I choose freedom because I don't want to be chained to tobacco.
• We choose golf because a hole in one feels a lot better than a hole in our lungs.
• I choose to have tobacco-free adventures now, because I never want to live with regrets.

Below are some of the posters created for the Manitou Springs anti-tobacco media campaign. Also, in addition to the Tobacco Education and Prevention Partnership (TEPP) for El Paso County Health Department, serious props go out to Partners for Healthy Choices (PHC), a local non-profit that works closely with the community of Manitou Springs and the school system. Laurie and Justin from PHC provided a ton of support in helping to make this project happen.

In addition to Manitou Springs HS, I also worked with a group of students from Fountain-Fort Carson High School in Fountain, CO. I'll post some of their images in another blog post coming soon. Also, stay tuned for the videos created for this project.

Finally, you can view a larger collection of images created for this campaign over on my Facebook page (be sure to "like" it)!