The day after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, this February, a fire alarm went off in the building where Angela Lamb’s daughter attends school.

Her daughter came home rattled.

“OK, now it’s happening to us,” was her daughter’s reaction in that moment of alarm, as she told her mother.

“That fact that this is what enters their minds ... I felt like I had to do something,” Lamb said.

With each new school shooting, she had felt rising anxiety about her children’s safety. A mom of two school-aged children in St. Louis County, Lamb had never been politically active before. She didn’t consider herself a “political person.”

But she could no longer watch reports of children killed by and running from mass shooters in their schools.

Lamb had previously made a short documentary about her journey of being diagnosed with a chronic illness and how to treat it. Now, she reached out to another documentary filmmaker, also a mom, in Washington, D.C.

Nancy Frohman was also feeling compelled to act when Lamb called her. Frohman wanted to find a way to support the Parkland student survivors begging for changes to the country’s gun laws. Lamb suggested making a coast-to-coast documentary about the March For Our Lives, a student-led protest on March 24 against gun violence, calling for reform to gun regulations.

Frohman got on board and put together a crew in D.C. Lamb recruited volunteers for a crew in St. Louis. She was referred to another woman filmmaker in Los Angeles, Alana Jackler, who agreed to handle coverage from the West Coast.

Combined, they had zero budget for the project. But plenty of passion.

Lamb was still making calls and recruiting people days before the march. In the process of interviewing young people and parents involved with the gun-sense movement, Lamb said she learned more productive ways of talking about gun reform.

“We purposely wanted to make it nonpartisan. It’s anti-gun violence, not anti-guns,” she said.

They pulled it off. Lamb still had to find a way to turn their raw footage into a film, though, and so she turned to another mom friend with school-aged children.

Michele Steinberg agreed to help edit the film, but she struggled with whether to attach her name to a project that could attract negative attention from those opposed to their message. She debated what to do for a couple of weeks.

Eventually, she decided to add her name to the credits.

“I thought anything like this that is worth doing was worth putting my name on,” she said. “I would put my name on it to help other people stand up.”

Those who worked on the 19-minute documentary, entitled “No More Thoughts and Prayers,” don’t believe that reforming gun laws should be a partisan issue. The vast majority of Americans already support common-sense measures like fixing the way background checks are conducted for potential gun buyers.

“No one is in favor of children getting shot in school,” Lamb said. “What can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future?”

She decided to release the film on Amazon’s video-on-demand service, where it is $1.99 to rent and $4.99 to buy. The proceeds will go toward Moms Demand Action, a group lobbying for better laws regulating guns.

She wants people to watch it with an open mind and realize that concerned parents from either political party can contact their representatives and let them know that they support reforming the laws that make it so easy for mass shooters to legally obtain weapons.

Steinberg said she was motivated to support the Parkland student activists who felt let down by the adults around them -- legislators beholden to a lobby working to protect and strengthen the position of gun manufacturers.

“I’m just one person,” she said. “But maybe I can motivate others.”

When making an ultra-low-budget independent film, you call in lots of favors.

That’s why a film crew and I were shooting in my friends’ sprawling suburban house and backyard. I had convinced them to relocate their noisy rooster to our backyard and open their elegantly decorated home to more than a dozen 4- and 5-year-old girls, who would be extras in this scene.

We were shooting a princess-themed birthday party on a sweltering August day. The crew was dripping in sweat. The children could only go outside for short periods of time, so they were mostly cooped up inside and getting antsy.

Between takes for a key scene, someone mentioned that one parent and child had taken off after the girl spilled red Gatorade all over the light-colored living room rug. My heart sank, and I immediately went to clean it.

Then my phone rang. My husband, who was dropping off our daughter at a camp in Texas, said our neighbor had called him because the rooster had escaped our yard and was strutting around theirs, terrorizing their dog.

This was shortly after one of the teenage extras, wearing an old bridesmaid dress of mine and playing the role of a party wrangler, said she felt woozy because of the heat and nearly passed out. Meanwhile, my director and cinematographer were having some serious “creative differences” on set.

At this moment, I wondered what had possessed me to want to make a film in the first place. I had zero experience in filmmaking. But I had a story I had written and a vision for how it could be told.

I quickly realized that I would need to surround myself with experienced people who knew what they were doing. I gave myself a crash course in filmmaking via the internet and friends who were willing to share their expertise.

And it turned out that I had some relevant skills after all. In that moment of chaos, I did what parents everywhere have learned to do: prioritize, improvise and delegate. I focused on trying to get the stain out of the rug, sent people to corral the rooster and tried to avert any more princess meltdowns.

A year after that shoot, after post-production headaches and some despair about whether this project would ever get done, we had a nine-minute short film that brought to life what I had imagined on a page.

I had written and produced my first film. The stain came out of the carpet, the rooster was unharmed and the tiny princesses all looked adorable.

I didn’t intend to make a film to teach my children anything. I simply felt compelled by a story. But looking back, I realized that when I shared my crazy behind-the-scenes stories with them, I was deliberately showing them the many challenges we faced because I wanted them to see how to respond when they inevitably faced obstacles on their own journeys.

I wanted them to see me struggle with something unfamiliar. I told them when potential funders said “no” after hearing my pitch. I shared the times that film festivals rejected my project. I let them see my doubts and insecurities. I wanted them to know that ambitious projects take time and suffer setbacks along the way.

Reaching tough goals requires some failure. Modern parents work so hard to shield our children from it. But that doesn’t do them any favors in the long run.

When we finally started showing the film to audiences this fall and hearing great feedback, I also shared my joy with my kids.

I reinforced that we had achieved some measure of success because many people worked so hard toward a common goal. I wanted them to share my pride in having figured things out, working together with a team to create something beautiful.

Adolescents feel so much pressure to achieve. They jam-pack their school schedules and load up their extracurriculars. They constantly get the message that one misstep, one bad grade, one significant rejection will ruin their chance at a successful future.

That’s simply not true.

They will deal with their own runaway roosters, overheated princesses and disastrous spills.

It turns out that’s part of the magic of making something worthwhile.

During the post-mortem of the contentious Senate vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, my mind kept going back to what a freshman said in the writing class I’m teaching.

The morning after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s testimonies, I asked how many students had watched the hearings. Nearly two-thirds of the students’ hands went up. I asked if anyone wanted to share how they felt. A young woman, one of the brightest in the class, said: “It made me feel like I didn’t have value. I can’t even put into words how I felt watching it.”

All I could say in response was that a lot of people could relate to how she felt. A few others, male and female students, also shared their thoughts. I wanted to give them a nonjudgmental space to say whatever they were thinking before moving on to the lesson of the day.

But her words and my response have haunted me.

I hadn’t said much by way of specifics to my own teenage children, either. I wanted to give the confirmation process a chance to play out, and the emotions involved felt too raw.

My husband and I talked to them in broad terms about the sexual assault accusations. I debated whether to watch parts of the testimony with my 15-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son, and decided against it because it was so graphic and disturbing. This was a real person’s pain, not a public spectacle.

In the aftermath of the confirmation, the questions are even more difficult: Has anything changed since 1991, when Clarence Thomas was confirmed despite Anita Hill’s testimony of sexual harassment? Why does society still reward men who face multiple credible allegations of doing terrible things to women? Why do so many still blame victims or -- even worse -- try to ruin them for speaking out?

The Republican senators either did not believe what Ford said, or didn’t let it stop them from voting to confirm. One Democratic senator voted in support of Kavanaugh. The Republican president openly mocked Ford at a rally. His supporters heard him and cheered and laughed.

Those are facts, as hard as they may be to accept.

This was a painful process and outcome for millions of people, most of all for Ford. But there has been progress in how our society responds to allegations of sexual misconduct and violence. It’s the difference between what could have been a blowout and ended up a narrow loss.

More Americans said they believed Ford than Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh’s approval rating was in the tank: a majority (52 percent) believed he should not be confirmed. At least a few senators felt they needed the political cover of a hamstrung FBI “investigation.” More than 2,400 law professors signed a letter publicly opposing his nomination. A Republican-appointed retired justice spoke out against confirming him. Kavanaugh was eventually confirmed by senators who represent just 44 percent of Americans. He lost support even from several who publicly supported him before his troubling sworn testimony.

All of this matters.

Ford was an example of courage under fire.

Speaking out about such a personal and painful trauma, knowing that you will face additional threats and abuse because you feel it is your civic duty, is nothing short of heroic.

She also showed us what healing can look like.

After the testimony, we talked to our teenagers again about the risks of underage drinking, the importance of respectful intimate interactions, how to respond in uncomfortable situations and how to be a good friend to someone who has been hurt. We told them that there’s never any shame in seeking help, and that people can survive and thrive after suffering traumas if they get help.

Young people are getting all kinds of conflicting messages in the wake of a series of highly publicized allegations, and the resulting backlash. I’d like to drown out the noise and tell them the following.

To boys and young men: All the research shows that your chances of being falsely accused of raping someone are far, far less than a girl’s chances of actually being raped. I feel confident saying that the vast majority of you know that touching a person against their will is wrong. Do more to make that knowledge part of the culture.

Loudly. Subversively. Consistently. Bravely.

To my student, and other young women and girls: It’s OK to feel angry and frustrated and discouraged and sad. Survivors will not be silenced. We will keep working toward a more compassionate and just society. This country belongs just as much to you as it does to anyone else.

You have immeasurable value.