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

Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream is a joyous, nostalgic ode to the carefree joy of being a teenager. It’s also the complete opposite of the teenage reality faced by school shooting survivors and high school kids today. It was therefore the only choice of music to tell the tragic stories of our young survivors. We realized that the lyrics of Teenage Dream, when performed by our teenage survivors, take on a new tragic meaning and begin to eerily describe their experiences with gun violence. This, along with the partnership of Katy Perry herself, made a bold statement about the US epidemic of school shootings.