Not really sure where this goes so please move it if it's in the wrong place.
Came across this on Facebook and as someone on the autistic spectrum myself and being a big fan of Bayverse Bee it interested me muchly and knowing there's folk on the spectrum on this site too I thought they might like to see. It's about a couple who are making short fan film featuring Bumblebee (in classic 2007 form) in a public service announcement (like the old Transformers/GI Joe cartoon ones) for their six year old son, Sam, who has autism and does not speak.
Here's the text copied pasted from the Justgiving page
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding ... =4rMWzeymr (which I made a small donation) they set up to raise £300 to help them produce the film.
"We are making a short film about Autism, specifically a inability to communicate using your own voice, our six year old son Sam, is severely Autistic and has not spoken a word since he arrived six years ago, We were shocked to witness one day a Woman look upon sam with disgust as he walked around a supermarket making his random sounds and screeches, the look on her face was what I can only describe as horrified and she proceeded to shake her head and move away from Sam very quickly.
As a short film maker I wanted to do a short film to educate people on different ways an Autistic person might communicate and the tools they may use, in this project the autistic child uses a system called PECS, in witch the child has a deck of cards depicting items and locations from everyday life, they simply find the picture card they want and show it to someone, this allows the Autistic child to say what they want in a visual manner.
Why Transformers?, we were producing a transformers fan film, as I am a massive fan of the series and I always intended that film to somehow raise money for the national autistic society in honour of Sam, as of yet I have been unable to fund that project, so the idea became about doing something smaller but still rase awareness for autism charity's, back when the original cartoon was released they had small public service announcements staged on at the end of the episodes with the tag line "KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE" so I wanted this project to be a live action version of one of shows PSA messages but with our own take and twist.
Why Bumblebee?, we chose Bee because he is the most recognised autobot with kids aside from Optimus prime but also that he also has to communicate in a non conventional way due to his voice box being destroyed so he was the giant robot mirror to out autistic child character and it seemed only right to have him teach the bully's in our short film a lesson in autism, and respect "
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