Research and Planning...

 When I started working with Ryan, I had 0 idea of what to do for our documentary. We sort of went through an entire class of trying to come up with something that could be the foundation of our documentary. What ended up happening was ryan came up with two ideas, one about the people affected by one of his friends being taken by ICE recently, and the other about another friend of his who has autism and plays drums, and a teacher who teaches special education music. We decided on the second topic, originally focusing on the friend of his who played the drums.

We ended up making a rough documentary outline on Ryans friend, who btw is named Jacob. We created a goal for the documentary to correctly document the special connection between autism and music. We also created a list of B-roll we should use. 

This documentary outline was created by the both of us, we finished off that day with a general idea, and ryan attempted contact with his friend. Everything up until this point was going at a decent pace.

what? He's where???? 

You cant ever have one of these projects without SOMETHING going wrong silly! As it turns out, Jacob, our MAIN subject (and possibly only planned one at the time) was in the hospital???? I forgot exactly why, I think he was like really really sick or something. This completely restarted our positioning back to the start, the only lingering thing was the idea to still document the relationship between music and autism.

After a bit of thinking, Ryan told me about how someone in his family goes to a school with a music program for kids with autism, down syndrome etc. and how we may be able to film the teacher as the subject of our documentary. This was a great change honestly, because it increased the overall credibility past a high school student. Honestly, we did need that change from the original topic.

We ended up working together to create a new outline that sort of piggybacked off of the old one (which I unfortunately do not have any access to, since it was on paper and I forgot to take an imagr). The document had meaningful questions to ask the interviewee (teacher), as well as more solid framework. With this new outline, ryan contacted the teacher and decided to leave early one day in order to film the majority of the content (I was kind of left out cuz I literally could not leave early on a B day). So I was told to consider making some animated B-roll, which honestly I dreaded, but took on the challenge and began some light research and consultance (bombarded my animator friend with questions).

“How much of the footage did you help film?”