A Place Where Families Come First for Autism
Posted by SugeyCE on January 12, 2010 under Documentary | 
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Here’s the newest promotional video for The United States of Autism documentary. It was put together for the Pepsi Community Challenge in 2010.
Posted by Richard Everts on November 3, 2009 under Documentary | Be the First to Comment
I’m proud to announce that production has begun on a new full length documentary from the Tommy Foundation on autism in the Northeast. While the title is of course nowhere near ready for submission, we have an excellent idea of how everything is going to progress with the story.
It will be a story about Sugey and myself becoming autism advocates with Tommy and his development. This includes us setting up interviews with prominent individuals in the autism community which I can not name publicly at this time, but rest assured they are pretty “big” when it comes to the community. However, to give the story a twist, we’re adding 6 families into the mix that come from all kinds of different backgrounds to show how autism is affecting families across cultural boundaries. This is kind of the multiple story line situation you see in so many documentaries, where you have one main story then lots of subplots that come together in one overriding theme. Most of the interviews and talks will be given in the original family languages and translated into English for our viewers. So far, we have one Asian-American family that speaks Korean and Chinese, two Hispanic families speaking Spanish only, one African-American family, and 2 caucasian families.
Sugey is compiling the stories into her first book, which I’m very excited about as well. She does a wonderful job relating to individuals, and I know there are VERY few people looking into the cross-cultural problems associated with children on the ASD spectrum. Production has already begun with the scheduling of interviews and the materials needed to pull this together.
We’ll be filming in 1080 HD on a Canon XH-A1 HDV camera system with an RODE NTG-2 boom mic for the primary camera and an HV20 for the secondary. We also have a full spectrum lighting system with reflectors for the interviews. I just ordered a neat slate to help with the syncing and plenty of HDV tapes. I’m assuming right now we’re looking at close to 100 hours of footage before we’re done with interviews and stock footage. We’ll be editing everything with Final Cut Pro on either a 2009 Mac Pro 2.26 Xeon with 6 GB RAM or a Macbook Pro 17″ 2.93 with 4 GB Ram depending on the situation. Special effects will be created with Affects Effects CS4. I haven’t decided on a Sound Editor, though I do enjoy both Soundbooth CS4 and Soundtrack Pro as part of the Final Cut Studio suite. For color correction I’m going to try and do in Color, but I don’t have the expertise so I might have to do it in Final Cut and hope for the best. Storage is a major issue, especially with HDV taking almost 500GB for 10 hours of footage, so I’m looking at starting with a MyBook Mirror 2 TB RAID to start with my main project and software, and then get additional hard drives without the RAID for the rest. Since everything is on HDV film, a data loss will just mean a recapture. Painful for sure, but not catastrophic.
I’m really jacked to be putting this together. I think it can be a major milestone for the autism community and will help many people understand what families go through regardless of their socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. If you have any suggestions or know of any way to contribute, let us know.
