The Key of G (2007)

A disabled young adult and his mother’s journey to establish his future care so he could survive and thrive without her

feature length documentary, assistant editor / associate producer

project website

What if the people in a documentary become the audience?

Funded by the Independent Television Service division of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, this feature doc investigates the interdependence between disability, family, and living a creative life.

As assistant editor I logged all film footage and delivered assembly edits to the director and editor to use in story development. It was repetitive work and not always creative, but I saw every minute of footage shot for this film.

As I became more familiar with the film’s subjects, I started to notice long term patterns that weren’t visible in real time. In order to translate what I was seeing, I edited scenes together not for the filmmakers, but for the film subjects. This put the footage to use in a way that, I hoped, helped the people in the film gain a new perspective on their lives and decisions. These scenes inspired the primary subject’s mother to change caregiving agencies, which resulted in a significant and lasting improvement in the quality of her son’s life.

That impact wasn’t visible until years later, so as we crafted film festival applications and attended screenings that centered the film makers, I realized it was more important to me to address the issues raised in the film than to make the film. I cared more about the film subjects than the film, or my career as a film maker. The specific path forward wasn’t clear, but I assumed I’d have to be in a social work or legal advocate role to make any impact, which is where I turned next in my career. I was lucky to learn quickly that those fields were, at the time, utterly devoid of creativity, and get offered a role as a digital producer in the gaming industry.

I haven’t lost the appetite for using media as a design tool, not an end to itself. This project was my first step into the field of design.

Can documentary media scaffold stakeholder decision making toward a preferred future state?

Documentary film makers find the story as they shoot and edit.

On this project the film subjects were in the active process of figuring out how to maintain the quality of life for a young man who needed full time care, but who was reaching adulthood. His mother knew she couldn’t be the constant in his life, and started the journey of setting him up to live well without her constant advocacy. Solutions to her problem didn’t exist, and the known alternatives didn’t meet her quality standards. Her response was to DIY a solution by slowly curating a community of artists and musicians to support her son. The film started as she began the process of transforming that informal community into something sustainable. The struggles of navigating this process were beyond what the lens could capture, so her journey was not featured in the film structure.

My years of undergraduate work studying political philosophy and visual anthropology kicked in, and the fundamentally extractive nature of what we were doing deeply troubled me. I wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.

These experiences heavily informed my instincts as a designer, especially in the practice of participatory and speculative design. I still use media as a form of making in these disciplines, and believe that media is highly underutilized in the design space. There’s something so fundamental to our daily lived experience, photo and video are part of our everyday material world, and the ubiquity of mobile devices, I find it to be an extremely useful form for speculation and participation. People make media all the time. Let’s apply that to remake a preferred world.

“Doing Visual Ethnography” by Sarah Pink on has been on my shelf for 20 years and I still reference it often.