Children tremble as they make their way down the hallway. Their eyes wander as they try to get their minds off of their situ-ations at home. As they avoid the adults, their eyes land on the walls surrounding them.

They are blank.Shiri Phillips, the development administrative assistant at

Project Harmony, sees these walls as a blank canvas. “Our building has beautiful artwork in the atrium, and it’s

a place where a lot of children come to. It needs to be child-friendly,” Phillips said.

Project Harmony is an organization that collaborates with professionals and the community to protect and support ne-glected and abused children of all ages. The facility houses the offices of a team of law enforcement, investigative, medical and referral professionals devoted to keeping children safe and prosecuting offenders.

To fill the blank canvas of the wall at Project Harmony, Phil-lips turned to a friend, Westside art instructor Liz Dittrick. Together, they planned Westside students could paint a mural there.

“I went to Westside High School, and I know the talent Westside has in their department, so I contacted Ms. Dittrick,” Phillips said.

Westside’s chapter of the National Art Honor Society will be painting a butterfly mural that will cover all 35 feet of both walls of the hallway. It leads to a healing garden in the shape of a butterfly. The mural will show a caterpillar developing into a butterfly with a tree and grass in the background.

Sophomore Yvonne Stone, a member of the National Art Hon-or Society, said Project Harmony’s theme of transformation in-spired the butterflies and went naturally with the healing garden.

Dittrick said students created sketches after the butterfly theme had been chosen. After that, the students selected the sketch they liked best. Next they drew enlarged images of the sketch and transferred them to the wall. The students decid-ed what colors to make the drawings and started painting the walls. According to Phillips, the mural should be finished by April 23.

“I just like the story [shown in the] mural,” Stone said. “I think it’s inspiring to the kids — the whole story of it and just working on it every day.”

Stone said five to 10 students work on the mural every Wednesday from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 or 9. The art students also occasionally meet on weekends.

This is the first year the National Art Honor Society has been at Westside, and it is also its first community-based project. This is also the first time Project Harmony has done a project with a high school, according to Phillips.

“I wanted to create a project connecting one of the high schools in Omaha because to have that correspondence with a non-profit and a high school is important with the work that we do, and to teach kids about what we do,” Phillips said.

For the Westside art students, the purpose of the mural is to make the children at Project Harmony feel welcome in the building.

“The whole project and location where we are painting is a place that kids enter when they are about to be transferred to another family or they’re about to be placed, so it’s a spot where they might feel insecure or scared or nervous,” Dittrick said. “This hallway [as they walk down] is to uplift them and be a happy place for these kids.”

Stone thinks the mural she and the other students are work-ing on will add life to the hallway.

“I hope that [it] brightens their day a little when they see it,” Stone said.

8701 Pacific St. Omaha, NE 68114

Volume 58 Issue 6

THElance

SPRING SPORTS PREVIEWCheck out pages 12 and 13 for the Lance’s coverage of the preseason preparations for spring sports.

February 28, 2014

Jack and jackFor senior Viners, Westside’s a place to be ‘normal’

By Emma Johanningsmeier

Editor-in-chief

By Phoebe Placzek

News editor

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PROJECT HARMONYStudents paint mural, help nonprofit organization

Junior Blair Goldstein and sophomore Yvonne Stone work on the mural at the Project Harmony building. The mural will have a butterfly theme. Pho-to courtesy of Shiri Phillips

Photos by Sarah Lemke and Estella Fox

At Westside, seniors Jack Gilinsky and Jack Johnson are two pretty normal kids, but to their 2.2 million followers on Vine, they’re something else entirely. They’re Internet celebrities, teen heartthrobs who get over 100,000 likes on each six-second video they post a n d have fanfiction written about them.

They’ve attended conventions full of screaming teenage girls

alongside other immensely popular Vine and Instagram users, and they recently released a song that hit #7 on the iTunes hip-hop chart.

As much as they have going for them outside of school,

though, Westside High School is still one of the places they feel most

at home. “Nobody’s ever going

to come up to me here and ask for a picture,”

Johnson said. “When I’m with

my friends, I don’t really like it when

people come up to me and ask for pictures. I just want to live a normal high school life, and so I love it here at Westside just because we can be ourselves and be with our friends like we’ve always been. We don’t really think about what’s going on with the whole Vine thing while we’re here at Westside.” “The whole Vine thing” started in early July last year, when Gilinsky and Johnson were enjoying watching videos on the social media site Vine. Thinking of how their friends called them class clowns, they decided to try their hand at making Vines themselves. They made a joint account with the username Jack and Jack. By the time Johnson had to leave for summer camp, they were at 1,000 followers. Then, Gilinsky posted a Vine in which he drove up to a Dairy Queen drive-thru window shirtless, accepted an ice cream cone from the employee inside, and smeared the ice cream on his chest as the employee looked on. It was a hit. A few weeks into the school year, Jack and Jack were at 50,000 followers. Once they posted a Vine called “Nerd Vandalism” and got 100,000 new followers in a week, posting regularly became more of a job than a hobby. They’ve continued with it ever since. The subjects of their Vines vary, but the fast-paced, short videos usually feature several shots spliced together, and some type of “punch line” at the end. In some of them, one or both of the boys are dressed up; sometimes there’s a mom character, sometimes they’re girls, and sometimes they’re dressed as other characters. Often, a song is used in

a creative way. Johnson said coming up with topics for the Vines is a simple brainstorming process. He and Gilinsky try to make funny, relatable videos teenagers will appreciate. “If it’s something the masses can relate to, it’s pretty much set in stone that it’ll get a lot of likes,” Johnson said. “We’ve kind of figured out what is going to get likes and what isn’t going to get likes.” However, for Gilinsky and Johnson, getting likes doesn’t always mean letting their own sense of humor show. Instead, they focus on making Vines they think will make their fan base laugh. Johnson said there are a few videos that have featured his and Gilinsky’s humor, but they’ve never been as popular. “Like with any business — we consider it a business now — we’re kind of in it for the continued on page 10