Johnson Hansen said he knows what it’s like to be bullied.
He even has a few friends who have been cyber-bullied.
Hansen, a 10th-grade student at Garner Magnet High, said a few of his close friends and former classmates who were cyber-bullied while in school are now being home-schooled. They received text messages, that said “Just go kill yourself,” or “You’re so ugly.”
So when he creates videos about anti-bullying, he makes sure he puts his best effort into it.
“I feel like cyber-bullying is just in a lot of places now,” Hansen said. “And a lot of people don’t think they’re doing anything (bad), but they really are.”
Hansen and a few of his classmates won the Wake County Schools’ Bullying Prevention Video Contest for an anti-bullying video he directed.
Hansen, 16, served as the writer and director of the video.
Johnson worked with a group of seven other students who served as the actors and helped him create the film. He said it took at least 20 hours to shoot and edit the video.
In the video, a life-like computer named “Cyber-Bully 2000” walks into the school’s cafeteria and bullies each student, by knocking down their lunch trays, tapping their heads and saying mean things about them. After a while a bigger computer stands up to the bully computer and shuts it down to prevent it from bullying anyone else.
The message: cyber-bullying is not cool. Pull the plug. Stand up and speak out.
Hansen said he wanted to take a lighter approach to this video as opposed to other anti-bullying videos, where the victim tends to commit suicide at the end.
“That hits strong and brings the message across but we wanted for our videos to be more upbeat, and more like “We can do this. We’re in this together, happy kind of videos,” Hansen said. “So we wanted the villain or Cyber-Bully to be mean but at the same time laughable so it was easier to inspire people to stand up to the bully instead of depress them.”
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