Public safety films made for teens, by teens

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety wants to encourage more kids to wear their seat belts, and local teenagers are using their filmmaking skills to help.

Matt Ferro, a Wayzata High School senior, is one of six finalists in the department's Rock the Belt competition, which encourages high school students to write, film and produce their own 30-second commercials about why it is important for teenagers to buckle up.

Seventy-six teenagers from around the state entered the competition, and the videos of the finalists are currently posted on a website for the public to select the winner. Voting ends on May 18, and the winner's commercial will be broadcast on television this summer. The winner also gets a $1,000 prize.

Ferro spent weeks editing his video titled "Nothing Can Replace a Life." It took him more than four hours to shoot a scene in which a car runs a red light and smashes into a vehicle carrying two high school girls.

"I wanted to have something that would be impactful," said Ferro, who plans on studying film at Emerson College in Boston this fall. "A lot of teenagers think that wearing a seat belt is just a whatever thing."

Jean Zimmerman, Ferro's television production teacher at Wayzata High, said a student like Ferro "only comes around once every four or five years."

Ferro is so advanced that he sometimes helps teach the class, showing his peers editing tricks that Zimmerman said even she didn't know about.

"[Teenagers] are surrounded by so much media these days," Zimmerman said. "They know what it should look like and they mimic a lot of what they see."

For his commercial, Ferro sought help from the Plymouth Fire Department to stage the crash site and play the parts of the emergency responders at an accident scene. Other Wayzata students played the parts of the two girls involved in the car crash.

Michael Bonde, a junior at Buffalo High School, is also a finalist in the competition -- one of the two finalists from his high school, along with Neil Gleason. He said film production is more of a hobby than a calling for him. He produced a film with his two brothers, Jacob and Ryan, titled a "Brother's Loss," which took him about 12 hours to edit and three hours to film.

Bonde's clip tells the tale of two brothers dying in a car accident because they were not wearing their seat belts.

"I wanted to do something a little different," Bonde said. "I wanted to get the message out there to watch out for people because you don't want to lose them."

"What we're looking for is how the message is received by other teens," Pehrson said.

According to the Department of Safety, during the last three years, 149 teenagers were killed in car accidents in Minnesota, and about 60 percent of them were not wearing seat belts.