First Therapy Session

We had a YouTube channel with a channel intro.  Now what?  We knew we needed to integrate her having fun, content she was interested in, and then incorporate therapy. We asked her what she liked the most out of what she was watching on YouTube.  At that time, gummy videos were trending, and Fabu loved watching these, especially those that showed them making gummies. 

She believed these videos were not only fun but wanted us to do these as a family.  We anticipated she would be as engaged as she was previously during the filming of the intro video.  Actually, we were counting on it!

Our gummy-making journey began!  We went all out.  We knew the success of what we were doing depended on setting the stage and creating a magical experience for Fabu.  We went out and got a new 4k video camera, lights, microphone, built a background, and even bought a movie director clapperboard.  As you can see, for us, it was all in!   Mind you, our only experience making videos was shooting clips really quickly on our cell phones.   We had no idea how to use lighting or how to incorporate audio into the camera.  We clearly needed many crash courses on how to make videos for dummies.  YouTube became our academy, and there we found videos that taught us all these things we had no clue how to do.  This may sound like a big investment, but truly knowing what we know today, our initial investment cost us what today we spend in just a single light. 

After going through many YouTube tutorials and receiving all the new equipment, it was time for our first “professional” video.  We were all so excited! We made final decisions about the gummy-making video's content, and we went out and bought all the ingredients so everything would be ready for film day.  Never in our lives had we bought so many packets of gelatin, so much so that we ended up having to go to several different stores to get all the gelatin we needed. It was A LOT!!!

Film day arrived, and we were ready to go!  After all the tutorials we watched, we were pros and knew how to set up everything from the microphone location, the camera's correct angle, where each of the lights needed to be placed to obtain the best lighting and has no shadows.  We felt like true filmmakers.  

And, of course, nothing went as we imagined. Our first video was making a gummy bar-b-que sauce bottle and took forever to make.  Fabu was interested in making the gummy all about 5 min.  She quickly left us in the kitchen making the gummies while she went to watch TV. 

We had written a script for Fabu to use, but she refused to follow the script and instead wanted to use her talking Olaf, a toy that was popular at that time, as her sidekick that she would talk to.  We let her do that so that she would not get upset and lose interest as we were already too far invested in the project and feared she would shut down and not want to participate, as this was her default.

We let her improvise and explain what she was doing and what was going on.  We asked her to express herself as best as she could.  This is where the problems started.  There were certain words unfamiliar to her that took her a long time to learn and remember so she would be able to repeat them.  This triggered her to become frustrated as we would not let her use words that were easy for her to say or things that did not make sense.  We by this point, we're exhausted after working all day and hours spent making several batches of gummies, leaving us with our patience much stretched.  We always tried to keep it fun and turn all of her mistakes into jokes to be a good experience.  The truth was that it was becoming late, we were running low on patience, and neither Fabu nor ourselves could continue, so we ended the filming not knowing if what we had done was a failure or a success.   Not knowing if we would ever do that again.