Cut Films (The Roy Castle Lung Foundation)

Our short film and social media project, Cut Films educates young people about smoking in a creative way. This project provides a unique opportunity to engage young people to collaboratively learn about the dangers of smoking. We use a creative and cost efficient film production process with social media to inspire young people to educate each other by using new transferable skills. It builds on the ‘social influence approach’ to make smoking less aspirational and delivers key messages in a way in which young people can engage with and understand. An annual competition provides a focus for the campaign and an incentive to participate. Young people are receptive to electronic social media messages and its persuasive nature provides an opportunity to influence behaviour. The combined approach of working with partner organisations at local level aims to reduce the likelihood of smoking.

The project actively encourages young people to work collaboratively to research smoking with guiding materials, write and produce short films about what they think, and upload to the DHC website. The process of filmmaking allows ideas to be presented in a visual and powerful way. Young people then share their film with their peers, their family and the community by running an off and online campaign to get people to view and vote on their films. Social media networking and other resources have been developed to support this. Films are also judged by an expert panel of including three young people, using an agreed set of criteria and weighted scores, which include relevance to theme, clarity of message, impact and evidence of research. Cut Films supports young people to shift attitudes by creating messages using film that will influence their friends not to smoke and inform the wider community on the impact of tobacco.

The Campaign works in partnership with Government, local authorities, schools and youth groups to deliver targeted smoking interventions. DHC is based in London and work closely with the inner-boroughs and Home Counties. This application will fit in well with our youth panels that we deliver and our work with disadvantaged youth from Pupil Referral Units, young carers associations, NEETs and disability organisations.

The Cut Films project is recognised as a model of best practice. It has been awarded the GSK Impact Awards Winners 2015 and Highly Commended by The Civil Society Charity Awards 2014 and short-listed out of 1200 charities in the Guardian Charity Awards 2014. The World Health Organisation will be publishing a case-study of best practice on Cut Films in 2015.