Miller Place Students' Anti Bullying Video Creates Buzz

An anti-bullying video made by l students has stood out and become the face of a Suffolk County anti-violence program.

The video, created for the 2011 Student and Youth Prevention Film Project, will be aired along with 24 other films at a Red Carpet Event at the Patchogue Theatre on Wednesday, April 13. Miller Place's has stood out among the pack and the likeness of Katrina Svoboda, the star of the film, will be used as the face of the campaign.

"It was definitely a stand out," said Jennifer Freeman, organizer of the event. "We previewed these films with the film commission and they really caught on to the Miller Place one. It was very powerful and I reached out to Katrina to use a freeze frame of the film as the poster for the campaign and the literature that will go out afterwards."

Student Ambrose Teniozo wrote, edited and directed the film which involved 17 students all together, all of whom have been involved with the Miller Place Drama Club.

"We had a whole bunch of different ideas and it didn’t all come together until really late," said one student, . "We really just needed one person to come up with one main idea and that was Ambrose."

After just one day of filming,  the video was ready and students have been promoting it through facebook and youtube. The video currently has over 700 hits on youtube, and it has created a positive buzz among faculty and students at the high school.

"We started to discuss how they were going to do it and that took some time because they all had different ideas," said Phil Ruggiero, a teacher who helped gather students for the project." Finally they decided to set up a situation to show how cliques in a high school cause problems. They did an absolute excellent job and portrayed it as something that really could happen."

Freeman said the program was put into students' hands in order to promote anti-violence of all kinds in creative ways that would get the message out to the public and raise awareness.

"It doesn’t just show one form of bullying but various types," said Matt Villapando, another student who starred in the film. "There's physical bullying, then the second part she’s socially made fun of by her peers, then later she was ostracized by the people she thought she belonged with. It goes to show that there are many types of bullying, there’s not just one form."

The gala is free and open to the public. Call 631-853-4000 for more information.

Watch the video above and see the cast and crew in the table below.