the scariest day of my life

 It was Friday, I had made plans with my mother to get signed out early, sacrificing my education for the purpose of the documentary, so you guys are very welcome. I'm completely joking I actually didn't miss much apparently:

 First, when I got to the school, Dr. Laz had allowed me to get b-roll footage from 2 of his classes, one with older students who were less severely impacted by their neurodivergence, and one with special needs students who were in wheelchairs. This turned out to be great for my piece as it introduced the concept of comparing these perspectives which I honestly hadn't even thought of. While this isn't really an area of emphasis within my final piece I think the subtlety of showing all the different types of students Dr. Laz works with reinforced how great of an instructor he is.

While attempting to remain as invisible within the classroom environment as possible, a major obstacle I faced was students wanting to interact with the camera, and sometimes, in the instance of my friend Jordan, helping film. Instead of trying to prevent this however, I decided to embrace it and Jordan actually helped me get a really nice shot which I ended up using!

JORDAN

The shot Jordan obtained

I also found myself improvising in the interview sequence a little bit, as one of the questions which I gave in the last post asked how Dr. Laz encouraged participation from those who were nonverbal. Thrilled by this question, Dr. Laz went into an in depth explanation of how his music jacket worked in the middle of the interview. While the content was great, I figured it would make more sense for him to show and explain rather than just explain, so I asked if he could demonstrate and he happily did so. I liked this part of my documentary a lot, but unfortunately I wasn't able to get any b-roll of Dr. Laz actually using it with a student which would have been even better.

Also, something that jumped out me as soon as I arrived to the classroom was a massive issue - he turns his lights off when class starts. When planning, I should have reached out to him and conducted preliminary questioning and I could have found a better way to deal with this aspect, but thinking on my feet I just cranked the exposure on my camera which, while it made all the screens and lights super bright in the majority of my b-roll, made it so you could actually see what was happening in the majority of the b-roll I gathered.

Also taking inspiration from some portions of Abstract, I figured static b-roll would not only be a safety net but also a cool stylistic choice to make so I took some pictures of pictures he had hanging on his classroom wall which I could add key frames to in post production. This turned out to be a really good choice and in some instances, provided context more than any of my b-roll ever could. This is also how I settled on the name for my documentary. A poster on his classroom wall with a picture of a tiger labeled "I'd like to have your class for lunch" was altered a little bit into "I wish I had your class for lunch". I felt it fit the lighthearted theme of my documentary and captured how much Dr. Laz values his students and vice versa.

Ultimately, while hectic no doubt, the production process was a lot of fun and filled with as much error as I expected, but I had left a lot of time for myself to attempt to fix these errors and glue the whole thing together into one doc.