While many 15-year-olds have an idea of what they want to do when they grow up and enter the “real world,” few take their passions to the heights Kaylin George has at that age.

George’s dream is simple: She wants to get into the film industry someday. In order to make that dream a reality, though, she’s already hard at work honing her craft.

George has been making amateur films, PSAs and the like for years now. That passion won her a second place award at a recent annual contest hosted by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

She’s also has been interning at the Town of Fountain Hills, working on PSAs and other projects during the summer.

And even though she’s just a sophomore in high school, she took a “vacation” this year to check out a couple California film schools.

An active member of multiple clubs and sports, George said that one of the outside activities that receives a lot of her attention is the local Mayor’s Youth Council (MYC), which has provided her with the opportunity to work on her filmmaking along with pitching in around the community.

“Mayor’s Youth Council is the town’s way of providing a voice to local teens,” George said.

“We get the chance to talk about what we think is important to teens, as well as the issues that we think are important. We do a lot of volunteer work, too, and make a lot of public service announcements and things like that.”

The MYC is headed up by town volunteer coordinator Heather Ware, who George is interning for this summer.

High School teacher Bob Couture is George’s multimedia/technology instructor. And even though the two aren’t directly connected, it was a class assignment of Couture’s that eventually led to George’s second place award with the county.

“It actually started off as an assignment at the school, creating a random PSA on anything we wanted,” George explained.

“I wanted to do an anti-drug PSA. That PSA had the same idea as the one that won, but it was a very different project.”

After George joined the MYC and started working on other PSAs, she mentioned that she had done a similar project for Couture’s high school class.

When everyone saw it, she was asked to make a new version of the project for the town on a larger scale, turning the original one-minute PSA into an extended five-minute affair.

Eventually, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office opened up a contest for youths interested in making PSAs. George once again stuck to her anti-drug concept, producing a 25-second clip to submit.

“This new one was basically a bare bones version of my older PSAs,” George said. “My mom or one of her friends heard about it on the radio and told me about it, so I decided to try. I’ve filmed this thing three times now, with different actors and everything.”

For her videos, George said she relies heavily on her friends.

“Basically I just call them up and say, ‘Hey, do you want to be in this video?,’” she explained.

“They’re all really good sports. I’ve made lots and lots of videos, so they’re all really used to it, but I don’t think they really liked doing this one. Pretending to be druggies isn’t a very fun thing to do. But when they saw the final product, they thought it was pretty cool.”

Other than the obvious anti-drug messages apparent in her PSAs, George said her main goal has been to specifically reach a teen audience.

“People say that once you get into drugs, it’s harder to get away from them,” George said.

“I wanted to do something that would reach them before they can take that first step down the wrong path and show them that things can go a different way.

“I’ve seen a lot of PSAs, some of them even made by teens, that I don’t think would actually reach other teens. So that’s what I try to focus on.”

When her PSA about siblings, drugs and loss was named as this year’s second place winner, George said she was caught off guard.

“Before announcing the winners, they showed like the top 15 entries that the judges had picked,” she said.

“After I saw those, and how professional some of them looked, I figured there was no way I was going to win anything. I was shocked. It was amazing.”

Since then, George’s PSA has appeared on TV, broadcasting through Cox on channels specifically targeted at the teen audience.

George plans to continue pursuing her passion for film through the next two school years and is very excited to start working on the high school’s morning announcements. She’ll also keep working on her personal projects, as well as new PSAs for the town.

“I guess I always thought my videos were too juvenile or immature, which is why winning at that contest was so shocking,” George said.

“It showed me that people really do care more about things like emotional value than stuff like how good your camera is, how expensive it was to make and things like that. I did everything on my own, as a 15-year-old, and so I didn’t expect people to take it so well. It shows that people really do care about substance.”

To see Kaylin George’s PSAs for yourself, visit fh.az.gov/myc-psa.aspx