The Planning Stage

 After pairing up with my partner for the project, Andrew, we filled out a brainstorming sheet to generate ideas for what the heck our project would center around. To be honest, we were having a tough time. We considered making it on a student in our school who had found TikTok success through walking into random classrooms and playing the accordion. Recently, I'd had a friend recently detained by ICE and sent to Alligator Alcatraz and seriously debated trying to make a doc centered around it, but in all honesty, it just seemed like too big a task to tackle within the 2 week time slot we were given to make the doc. We also talked about making it about my friend Jacob, who plays drums in a math rock band, but he fell pretty sick right around when we reached out to him. 

Our initial brainstorming sheet

Like I previously mentioned, the Oasis op-doc really inspired me when picking the topic for my group's documentary. I ran the idea by Andrew of making a documentary on my special needs brother's former music educator at his special education school, Dr. Laz. He also really reminded me of Christoph due to his immense passion for special needs music education, which I feel really shone through in my documentary.

Dr. Laz and my brother

After considering for a while, my partner and I eventually decided that having Dr. Laz as the only interview subject was the right choice. While risky in the case of being unable to film with him due to unforeseen circumstances, which would mean even more scrambling to find a subject and whatnot, not only would worrying about one interviewee be a lot less time consuming, but as I mentioned in my last blog post, the intimacy that Abstract was able to create with just one interview was unparalleled and something I desperately wanted to see if I was able to mirror. Our initial purpose was to educate people on the special relationship music and autism have in a sensitive and neutral way.

Loose shot outline

Rough outline with questions

Call it nepotism, call it resourceful, call it whatever you may like but my mother who works in my county school system and already knew Dr. Laz was able to reach out and ask if I could talk to him about being the subject of my documentary. He was enthralled and flattered at the thought and could not wait to get to work. In hindsight, I may have jumped the gun and could have benefitted from more planning but I interviewed him on Friday and we received the project that Monday. I was honestly trying to provide myself as much time as possible to edit and refilm if necessary, given that the only thing I had done prior remotely close to a production of this size was the short film last year, and given this topic is of such great value to me I really wanted to carry out the vision in my mind.

We also knew that we wanted to incorporate some research about the relationship between special needs individuals with autism, so I also did some digging online and made a rough draft of the voiceover for the introduction. I actually found some really cool info about how kids with special needs who experience music instruction are theorized to have a greater capacity for absolute pitch.

The questions I sent Dr. Laz:

• What strategies do you use to encourage participation from non-verbal students?
• Why did you become a music teacher for special needs children?
• What have your students taught you about listening/communication?
• What music do your students tend to gravitate towards

A sketch from Andrew's b-roll ideas

The creative b-roll I had additionally discussed from Abstract was also something that really stuck with me and I felt from the get go that some sort of animation would be really great to include as an introduction to the overall topic. While having minimal experience, he was open to the challenge and Andrew assumed responsibilty for producing the animation b-roll.

'

Ultimately, while my project may have gone a lot  more smoothly had I spent more time in the planning phase, I think the copious time we had left ourselves to navigate production and post production turned out to be a plus considering our lack of experience.