The Ninth
Factor process work
Tiffany Fry + Jeshua Read
subject Our subject was Tiff’s longtime friend from highschool, Joshua McCormack. Joshua has a rare form of severe hemophilia type B, and as a child suffered from an inhibitor, an antibody reaction that complicates treatment and occurs in 2% of patients with this kind of hemophilia. We decided to document his experiences because he often suffered from stigma from his peers and the erasure of his experiences because his illness is often invisible. Brenda, his mother, graciously provided us with an interview about the discovery of his condition and his painful, difficult childhood as they sought a means to treat his hemophilia.
process At this point in our project, we had a lot of footage and no idea how to divide it up. We watched through and started to organize what needed to go where, how we wanted our narrative to flow, and discovered our title, The Ninth Factor. One difficulty we had with organizing the footage was that it included a lot of terminology and situations that required a definition before it went any further. That simultaneously helped us shape the narrative by imposing a structure we needed to follow for it to make sense, but also meant that a lot of footage we wanted to include had to be sliced down for the sake of making the stuff that needed to be included as good as it could be.
process
The timeline and organization of clips. There was lots of layered audio and b-roll to go through, and lots of jump cuts. Josh was a bit nervous during his interview and there were a lot of bits cut out where he stuttered or lost his train of thought. Brenda had the opposite problem, where she could easily string together a long narrative that we would have to cut down to accomodate more footage.
process
Our AfterEffects edit of photographs from Josh’s childhood. Josh’s family didn’t document a lot of his illness because it was traumatic for everyone involved. But there were quite a few photos where he just happened to be having a bleed while doing other typical childhood things, like going to summer camp. These photos helped humanize him while also providing a glimpse into how rough it is being a sick little kid confined to a sling or wheelchair when children are supposed to be out enjoying themselves.