My mum gave me a book to read called The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida, a boy with autism who was 13 at the time of writing the book.
He would be considered quite severely autistic, as he is unable to speak and used a computer, and alphabet grid and a transcriber to write the book.
This book has been very useful in my research, as it gives me an inside perspective from someone who actually has autism, about how people with autism experience the world, and what they want people without it to understand about them. This has been invaluable considering the aims of the brief are to portray autism in a more positive light, and our specific aim as a group is to normalise autism and show people with it as perfectly functional human beings.
This book is also helping me to create my audio file for my animation, as I've been feeling overwhelmed at the thought of condensing 13 minute's of Luke's interview to about 30 seconds. The book is constructed as a Q&A format; so Higashida answers common questions he faces about his autism and tries to communicate why he does things differently to what people might expect.
This has caused me to consider what I personally want people to understand about autism, and what I think Luke wants people to understand, based on his interview.
Again, I think just discussing his hobbies and daily life and normalising autism is the way forward. I'm feeling more able to pick out important bits of the conversation to form a 30 second narrative about a normal guy, who happens to have autism, who wants to be understood a bit better.
I hope that our target audience - people who don't really know what autism is or have an experience of it - manages to identify our aims through these animations.
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