Film Gives One More Chance By Melissa L. Commodore, 10.27.05
"One More Chance" is a narrative and dramatization that depicts a group of friends who all have one thing in common, addiction.
A celebration party for a friend, and a few drinks leaves one person dead and friendships severed. In their pursuit to have fun one man decides to drink and drive. This decision changes his life and the lives of his friends forever.
Professor of Psychology at Regent University’s Mark Blagen said he wanted the video to have a dramatization that can be translated into testimonials, which his students helped him do.
“The video asks the question if you’re an alcoholic or not,” Blagen said. “Now and days we don’t even look at alcohol like it’s a drug, we look at it likes it’s a beverage.”
Blagen worked with Regent’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) to create a research project that challenges student’s beliefs concerning addictive behavior.
In the spring of 2005, 30 students from Blagens’ Additive Behaviors and Substance Abuse course, assisted in the development of a video titled “One More Chance.”
The class was put into groups of 3-5 to cultivate themes and develop a script on the prevention of substance abuse among college-aged students. This helped with the materialization of characters used in the video. The students then condensed important points from the research and wrote a script that re-encodes the message in a medium appealing to college-aged students.
The students then critiqued the research and received feed back from peers about the controversial content used in the video.
According to a CTL press release, the video was designed to be part of a short online “alcohol abuse prevention” course.
In addition to this, Blagen said the learning point modules dramatized in the video will be added to help the viewing audience.
“The goal is for viewers to receive information that may influence the prevention of their alcohol usage,” he said. Blagen hopes to deliver the video via web based involving an instructional course for all preview freshmen.
The course would involve four to five modules each consisting of 45 minutes in length. Some of the modules would include titles like “It can happen to me,” and “Living a life that matters.” Blagen said the course would also involve a narration module including scenes from the “One More Chance”video.
The video was developed for two important purposes, according to Blagen. The first reason was to give students who take his substance abuse and additive behavior course the chance to learn about substance abuse prevention. The second purpose was to develop a work that could assist in preventing abusive use of alcohol.
“The project would produce major outcomes and new understanding regarding the abuse of alcohol by college aged-students,” Blagen said. “Ultimately, we would like to test market the final product to interested Virginia Tidewater Consortium member schools.”
In April of 2005 the video, “One More Chance,” received an Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Technology. The student-developed video used actors from Regents School of Communication and the Arts to fill three of the lead roles.
Blagen said on October 27th of 2005 he will preview the video “One More Chance,” at an INCASE (International Coalition for Addiction Studies Education) conference in Silver Spring Maryland. He said that he wants people everywhere to be more conscious about alcohol addictions and how they affect others.
The next steps for the video research project, is to share it with other universities, according to Blagen.
“I am hoping to present it to the student services and health education program along with the Drug & Alcohol Task Force at Old Dominion,” Blagen said.
Blagen said he would like to have his spring Addictive Behavior course, for pastors and lay counselors get hands on training.
“They would attend prevention courses for addiction and four community meetings,” Blagen said.
He said the 2006 summer Addictive Behavior class will present basic ideas and content of the modules to CTL for further expansion on concepts. Eventually Blagen expects his students to take the produced course, to learn substance abuse prevention strategies and enhance the effectiveness of the product.
