TV SPOT LETS LOCAL BOY GIVE WORLDLY ADVICE

How would you change the world?

More than 1.5 million TV viewers are discovering 13-year-old Chris Mullen's solutions to the world's problems.

Chris won a contest sponsored by WFYI-TV (Channel 20) for youths to design a public-service announcement. The problems Chris addressed in his project ranged from drug abuse to radioactive waste to forest depletion.

"How the contest worked was, we had (students design) a story board, which is sort of like little different frames of video that you could sketch out to give you an idea of how you want your promotion to look," explained Todd Gould, on-air promotion manager at WFYI-TV. "We had a junior high winner and a high school winner. . . . Chris was the winner of junior high. . . . The high school winners were Kurt Hettle and David Moore."

Kurt and David are students at J. Everett Light Career Center at North Central High School.

Part of youth series

The theme of the contest, "How I could change the world," was determined nationally through the Public Broadcasting Service, Gould said. "This contest was something to encourage young people to not only just recognize the problems that we have but offer up solutions to the problems.

"It's part of our Operation Youth . . . which is a series of programs and specials and special projects like this that are designed to be dedicated to the young people here."

Judges for the local contest _ one of many held by public-broadcasting stations around the nation _ were WFYI staff members and educational outreach people, Gould said. The projects were judged on criteria such as creativity and neatness.

A range of issues

He said the student entries covered a range of concerns. "A lot of the ideas the students had were environmental in nature . . . anything from self-esteem types of things to teen pregnancies and drugs. . . . Some students focus on one particular aspect of it: homelessness, anything from forest depletion to radioactive waste to nuclear bombs."

Chris addressed many of those problems in his public-service announcement, which began airing on WFYI in June.

"I tried to come up with a good idea that I figured would catch the audience . . . and not bore them," he said.

Chris' announcement is being broadcast around shows aimed at youths, Gould said. He estimated it has the potential to reach 1.5 million to 1.75 million people in central Indiana.

Even though Chris focused on complex situations, "I tried to put it down into the basics so everybody could understand it," Chris told us. "Anybody who could understand English should be able to understand it.

"I feel it (the announcement) is really important, just for the fact of getting the message out to people. We need to take care of this and this other thing, and we need to do it now instead of sometime later when it's too late."

Not only did Chris enjoy having his message reach the entire city, but "we really had a lot of fun filming it and putting it together," he said.

Gould explained how WFYI transformed Chris' project into a public-service announcement. After filming parts of the announcement at various locations, he and Chris took their work to a computerized editing suite at WFYI, where they mixed the sound effects and video together.

"It didn't turn out how I envisioned it; it turned out better than I thought," Chris said.

Gould also thought the contest was a success. We had "a terrific turnout . . . one of the best responses in the country," he said. The station received 42 entries.

For Gould, the best part of the contest was "seeing young people be very creative in the way they approach a problem, not only being able to identify a problem but being able to come up with a solution for it."

Chris hopes his announcement will encourage people to think about some of the problems he addresses. He told us, "Nobody's special enough to not even try and help.

"This is the only place that we have that we can live in, and if we don't take care of it and stop polluting and destroying it, it's not going to last much longer."

Chris' PSA will air each day this week at the 5:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. WFYI- station breaks.

EDITED BY: Matt White, 12.