The driver's seat is no place to be using a cell phone, as Wiscasset High School junior Nathan Austin shows in his video “The Car is Mightier than the Phone.”

Austin employed his technological skills to make it look like a vehicle driven by a texting driver is about to collide with a truck. Statistics on cell phone-related crashes and deaths appear after the sequence, he said.

He simulated the sequence with his home computer, a digital camera he duct-taped to a baseball cap, video footage shot in the area of a driveway and a low-traffic, dead-end road, and large paper that served as a “green screen” with which he layered in the effects. The two vehicles were never moving at the same time, he said.

“It was very technical,” he said of the work.

Austin's video will be vying for a $1,000 top prize or lesser cash prizes when it and other Lincoln County teens' entries are screened Monday, May 6, at Skidompha Library. Judges will decide those prizes, but everyone who attends the free event can vote to choose the winner of the $100 Audience Award.

The Teen2Teen VidFest aims to bring attention to teen tobacco use, distracted driving and bullying, according to a Lincoln County Healthcare press release.

“Of course it would be great to win, but I just feel good that I was able to put my message out there and be able to use my skills to do it,” Austin said in an interview April 26.

Monday's screening and awards ceremony will take place in the library's Porter Meeting Hall. Doors open at 6:45 p.m., with the program set to start at 7 p.m. Attendees are asked to use the Elm Street entrance.

Of 15 contest entries, Austin's video was the only one submitted by a Wiscasset High School student, Orien Breen, a program coordinator for Lincoln County Healthcare said April 30.

Lincoln County Healthcare, Spectrum Generations, Skidompha Library and the Lincoln Home comprise the Lincoln County Health Literacy Partnership, which is holding the contest.

Among the judges is a longtime entertainment industry insider. Part-time Chamberlain, Maine, resident John Iltis has represented The Supremes and Zsa Zsa Gabor, promoted the documentary “Hoop Dreams”  and is a past chair of of the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago.

“I'm always encouraging young people to make visual pieces (and) I've always been a big proponent of independent films and filmmakers,” Iltis said April 30 when asked why he wanted to help with the contest.

Austin, the son of Anne Applebee of Wiscasset and Keith Austin of Waldoboro, hasn't decided if film-making is in his future. For now, it's just one of the ways he can build his skills, he said.

He is thinking of majoring in computer science because whatever career he chooses, he wants it to involve computers, he said.

Susan Johns can be reached at 207-844-4633 or sjohns@wiscassetnewspaper.com.