The film begins with vignettes of teenagers at home, solemnly reciting the words from something. It’s not totally clear what those words are from but hey sound familiar. Then, a teenage girl at a piano begins singing the words. It becomes clear that she is singing the lyrics to Katy Perry’s anthemic ode to adolescence, ‘Teenage Dream’. We see more teenagers singing the song, these are clearly not actors. We reveal that one of the teenagers is in a wheelchair. The film continues to cut between teenagers singing lyrics, which now take on a haunting new context. An end card appears that says: “The teenage dream is not what it used to be.’ We then cut to portraits of the same teenagers, but this time copy explains each person’s tragic experience as a school shooting survivor. The film ends on a family who lost their teenage son did not

Casting real school shooting survivors was core to the idea. We heard their devastating stories and wanted to highlight these brave teenagers for the first time in a PSA. Finding our cast was a delicate process that took over a year, working closely with Sandy Hook Promise and school shooting survivor networks to form relationships and build trust with survivors to ensure they felt comfortable and safe on set.