A 10-minute preview of a film called "In Blind Sight" will debut later today at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. Ben Frost, director of legal and public affairs for New Hampshire Housing, said he was inspired after hearing Claudia Folska, who is featured in the film, and invited her to keynote a conference of planners.
"As we were planning for the conference, Claudia casually suggested to me, 'Hey, why don't you film this conference; film my talk?'" Frost says. "And we thought, 'Well, that's a great idea, we'll do that.' And I happened to know a filmmaker, who happens to be my son, and we reached out to him and he was gung-ho on the idea, and he really took it from there, and has taken it much further than we originally anticipated."
"She was so dynamic, and also, the content of what she was saying really resonated with me," Ben Frost's son Matt Frost says. "And, I decided that, why should we just do a small recording, when we can go forward and make a full documentary, and actually make something that can reach people and that can have some sort of impact?"
Matt Frost successfully raised money for his project through Kickstarter and has begun interviewing people for the film.
"I've been all around New England," Matt Frost says. "I've been up in Burlington and Portland, and I've been in Portsmouth and Manchester and Concord. And I'm going to keep going to different places because there are so many people who have so many unique perspectives to give us."
MPBN Morning Edition host Irwin Gratz interviewed the Frosts:
Gratz: "Who is the audience for this film?"
Matt Frost: "Well, initially, I think, it was planners. And it is still. But I think also it is the uneducated, interested party. It is the person who is inrested in learning more about the subject, but I think it interesting for everyone."
Gratz: "Is there a specific, one thing you can point to that you learned in this process?"
Ben Frost: "Think about your smartphone and its touch screen and how it's all visual. Or a stove at your home that has touch pad. It's all visual. Certainly you need to touch it to make it work. But how do you know what it is that you're touching, without some sort of tactile clue if you don't have sight? So, very simple things like that. In the environment that planners work in, the built environment, there are certain measures we take that seem to make sense for people who have sight, like painted striping on pavement that delineate where traffic is supposed to go and where people are supposed to wait for traffic to pass. If there's no physical cue, other than the paint on the sidewalk. If you can't see it, you're in trouble. You can't navigate that environment."
Gratz: "Obviously an audience for this can be those people who are impacted by this — people who are, for whatever reason, blind or visually impaired. Have you been thinking at all as you produced the soundtrack for the film how to make sure that it is accessible to them, as well as to the sighted?"
Matt Frost: "I am so glad you asked that, because, yes I have. I am very much engaged in making sure that this is accessible. And so, as you will see in the 10-minute promo, I'm actually editing it closer to a radio play, than to a film. It will be heavily narrated. There will be a lot of sound cues. While the visuals are very important as a filmmaker, I'm focusing increasingly on the sound. At any given moment, there should be clarity in what you're hearing and what you're seeing, so that they feed each other. This is not a small task. It's much, much easier to focus simply on visuals. However, it is absolutely worth the effort I'm putting in to make it fully accessible. So it is a documentary, but it is not just a film."
The preview clip for "In Blind Sight," will be shown at 5:30 p.m. in the Wishcamper Center on the campus of the University of Southern Maine.
CORRECTION: Claudia Folska, not Folksa, appears in "In Blind Sight," not "Into the Blind."
