Throughout the process of creating this documentary we've strived to communicate an important, though largely unvoiced, story to our audience. Now, having managed this, we wanted to additionally share the story of our tribulations and how they lead to our success.
To set the stage, every student in the What's the Story program begins on an individual path to discover the topic they'd like to spend the remainder of the year researching. Breaking out of this initial phase looked differently for each of us; some original project ideas included Vermont's welfare system, queer inclusive curriculum, and researching depression and suicide among youth. Early November of 2017, seven of us agreed to collectively direct our efforts toward creating a documentary about sexual violence in colleges with an intersectional lens.
Shortly after the emergence of this new cohort, we realized that we could increase our credibility by changing our focus from colleges to high schools, since we were all current or soon-to-be high school students. As we began inspecting the issue of sexual assault at high schools, we discovered a similar set of problems to those we observed in colleges: lack of administrative response, bystanders enabling assailants, and a generally problematic culture which objectified women. Knowing this, we chose to interview high school students, administrators, organizations with a background of supporting sexual assault survivors, and a legal perspective. Reaching most of these groups presented a unique set of challenges: high school students are mostly minors, meaning we needed their parents to sign a consent form, some of whom didn't want their parents to know their story; administrators were busy and some of the ones we reached out to weren't interested in being interviewed; outside organizations almost unanimously showed an interest in supporting our work, so no hiccups there; and finally, just one area of the legal perspective took a long time to dissect and lacked a clear connection to the stories we'd heard from the other aforementioned groups.
Now, having overcome the hurdle of finding relevant and compelling stories, we advanced to the video editing stage of our work. It was complicated for many of us to lay hands on an editing software for the first time, but this learning curve was only steepened by the fact our team size wasn't exactly conducive to the work of video editing. We had the benefit of using a web-based editor, but only one person could access a file at any given time, meaning it wasn't uncommon for a file to be inaccessible for a fair deal of time. This prolonged the period it took for us to develop our short film but ultimately, despite the limitations, we were able to create a satisfactory product that conveys a powerful message of sexual violence awareness.