Short Summary 

             The subject for our documentary is twenty year-old Matthew (Matt) Yukich, who is quite possibly the youngest candidate ever to run for Village Trustee in the small town of Mokena, IL, located in Will County.  What makes him interesting is that he is not your typical politically informed young adult; Matt has long, shaggy hair, often wears flag-patterned pants, plays pool with friends on the weekend, and is known among his friends to have a side-splitting sense of humor.  Not only is he a genuinely unique individual, but the current board of village trustees in Mokena are made up of men and women roughly between the ages of fifty and seventy years-old, making this election particularly interesting.  Matt does not have a campaign team set up, as he would prefer to win this election fair and square by himself (if anything, he will hire a campaign manager to help get his foot in the door, and the guy he has in mind is a friend who is the same age).   To win this election, to be held in April of 2013, Matt plans to seek support from local businesses, as well as go door-to-door to win the voters’ approval.  Matt’s “campaign headquarters” will be at a local Denny’s, where he goes to eat on a regular basis (this will provide for us some comedy relief).  We are hoping Matt will win, and he has a pretty decent chance of doing so because his father is directly connected to the village board.

            The four of us, Connor McMahon (Director), Emily Feller (Producer, Gaffer), Graham Blus (Director of Photography, Social Media Director), and John Lamberger (Audio Operator, Editor), are extremely excited about our subject, as he is close in age and someone we can all relate to.  Our role as filmmakers will be similar to that of MTV’s groundbreaking series, “True Life”, a video journal format.  We will never make ourselves present in the documentary, but Matt will sometimes break the fourth wall (usually at Denny’s) to give the viewers a run-down of how a certain event makes him feel and his general campaign status.  The rest will be fly-on-the-wall style filmmaking.  

           Our goal to accomplish in this ten minute long documentary is to demonstrate that young people can make a difference in their communities and to break teenage stereotypes.  As this is a class project that is due on January 25, 2012, all four of us have discussed the possibility of continuing this documentary beyond our class due date to cover his campaign all the way past his election in April, and we are all on board and prepared to finish this documentary as a feature film.

 

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