Imperfect/I’m perfect

PSA asked students, teachers about insecurities

When freshmen Jesse Bulakites and Catalina Loeung were assigned a healthy body image project in their PE/health class, they thought big.

“We wanted to use creativity and technology,” said Loeung, who attends Vancouver iTech Preparatory. She and fellow iTech student Bulakites settled on the idea of a PSA and interviewed a variety of classmates about a potentially delicate topic: insecurities.

“It made it a lot more personal,” said Bulakites. “We actually got real people to come in and talk about real problems that they have in a way that affects people emotionally.” They also spoke with teachers. “A lot of people think that just teens have issues, specifically teen girls. But we also wanted to incorporate adults’ insecurities as well,” Bulakites said.

The pair transformed the source material, in one class period, into a poem at once specific and universal in the way that it speaks to anxieties and hopes.

Loeung and Bulakites hope that the message resonates with viewers and triggers positive introspection. “Just because you don’t meet the media’s standards of beauty does not mean you aren’t beautiful,” said Loeung.

Added Bulakites, “I believe everyone is perfect in their own way and they should love that about themselves.”