X-HALE

Congratulations to our joint runner up of the X-HALE SpunOut.ie Article Competition, Méabh O’Gorman from St. Bridget’s Girl Guides Clonmel. Check our her blog about her experience of taking part in X-HALE. Well done Méabh !  

St. Bridget’s Girl Guides is one of forty youth groups across twenty counties that have been hard at work over the last few months making and promoting youth-led short films to encourage young people not to smoke as part of X-HALE 2017. The entry with the most views will take home the Online Award at the X-HALE Youth Awards on July 6th, so show your support for Ireland’s first smoke free generation by checking out the entries at www.cancer.ie/xhale2017 and sharing your favourite with your friends!

My name is Méabh O’Gorman and I am a member of St. Bridget’s Girl Guides and we are based in Clonmel County Tipperary.

We have been involved in the X-HALE project for the past two years and I can honestly say that I think it benefited not only me but everyone in St. Bridget’s Guides. From coming up with ideas for the movies to writing the script, performing in it and filming it.

I wanted to get involved in X-HALE to raise awareness of what smoking does to not only the smoker but to everyone around them. If anything happened to a young smoker as a result of smoking, it would devastate their family, their friends and the community.

As part of X-HALE my group wrote and acted in two plays called The Walking Dead and The Recruit. It was an amazing experience and I hope that we will take part again next year. I was only involved in The Recruit and it was a wonderful experience and the other girls that took part in The Smoking Dead told me that it was just as cool. We all had so much fun writing and putting together the script. We sat in a big circle and threw around some ideas. Filming the movie was just as much fun. It was a very long day but it was so worth it, the end result was fantastic!

Through X-HALE my group and I learned so much about smoking and what it can do to you. We learned about the effects of smoking on the body, like the yellowish tint in the skin and the shortness of breath. We also learned about how giving up smoking can help your body go back to normal, like your blood pressure returning to normal and being able to taste and smell normally again. And about how a child growing up in a house with a smoker increases the child’s chances of becoming a smoker themselves. We also touched on how peer pressure can influence a child or young adult into becoming a smoker. Also, how a parent’s smoking can affect a child’s health through passive smoking.

Through X-HALE we learned how to say no to a cigarette and how smoking can have implications on your physical health and how you live your life, because of your dependence on nicotine.

I think X-HALE positively affected not just me but my whole group by giving us the knowledge and the skills early on to help us make the right informed decisions about smoking.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article!

Congratulations to our joint runner up of the X-HALE SpunOut.ie Article Competition, Philip Shestialtynov from Blanchardstown Community Training Centre.  Check out his blog that explains his experience of taking part in X-HALE. Well done Philip!  

Blanchardstown CTC is one of forty youth groups across twenty counties that have been hard at work over the last few months making and promoting youth-led short films to encourage young people not to smoke as part of X-HALE 2017. The entry with the most views will take home the Online Award at the X-HALE Youth Awards on July 6th, so show your support for Ireland’s first smoke free generation by checking out the entries at www.cancer.ie/xhale2017 and sharing your favourite with your friends!

Hello, my name is Philip Shestialtynov (I know, it’s quite the mouthful!). I worked on “I Told You So” (Senior), Blanchardstown Community Training Centre’s X-HALE film submission, along with the rest of our very own Digital Media class. It has been something of a tradition for the BCTC to submit a clip to the fine folks at the Irish Cancer Society for the last three years now, and hopefully, counting!

Perhaps it’s out of a sense of tribalism, but the main reason that I personally wanted to get involved in this year’s film-making was to see BCTC get its name out there. I feel this is important as we are a relatively young community training centre, having only officially opened in 2012, and the last in a long line of CTCs to do so. There’s probably no better way to achieve this than through trying to spread a message that’s positive for everyone. Well, except maybe for Marlboro.

Speaking of positivity, there was nothing but that during the actual process of creating our submission. I think we placed an especially noteworthy amount of effort into ensuring a high quality of cinematography (or maybe that’s the tribalism coming through again!), and it was entertaining to see a drone flying around while doing some of the outdoor scenes to say the least. My main role was to create fake blood, however I, like many others in our class, played many parts during production. I held the boom pole for the microphone, worked as a cameraman, and supervised storyboard writing and editing of footage. On that last point, there was a noticeable chunk of footage that we couldn’t squeeze in due to the time constraints presented. We could have almost made two films! Overall, the opportunity to work on this project greatly improved my general film-making skills, and this experience will prove valuable to any future endeavours of this sort that I might wish to partake in. And of course, I learned how to make some pretty tasty fake blood.

Admittedly, I didn’t see many new facts about smoking. However, one did grab my attention that I hadn’t previously seen. Only about 1 in 10 young Irish people smoke. I think that these two observations taken together are very important to the goal of the X-Hale competition. That is, the creation of a smoke-free generation in Ireland. Not seeing any new facts about how terrible smoking is for your health means that the organisations trying to spread information about this exact topic are succeeding, and clearly, these efforts are doing their job when viewed through the perspective of the 1 in 10 statistic. I now believe that it is a genuine possibility for the next generation to be rid of tobacco’s influence, viewing it only as a historical oddity in a few decades from now.

I wish everybody the best of luck in the awards ceremony on the 6^th of July, and hopefully next year’s submissions from everyone will be just as good.