Who Am I?

Hi Everyone, my name is Jason Lord and I created this project as a way to honor my sister's efforts to bring art to her community. As a long time Hollywood professional this allows me to contribute my time & skills to bring attention to an important science mission that is not well known, and also produce a story of an arts teacher that steps into advanced astrophysics and how that shows up in a middle-school classroom.

What's this about?

Earlier in 2015 my sister Stacy Lord was selected to participate in the NASA SOFIA mission as an Airborn Astronomy Ambassador which is part of an education outreach program to bring astronomy science to schools throughout the country. SOFIA stands for Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy and is housed aboard a converted 747 aircraft carrying a 2.5 meter diameter telescope that is dedicated to astronomical research at altitudes of 45,000 feet. This gets the infrared instruments up high enough above enough atmospheric distortion in order to survey the earth and sky in the infared spectrum.

Who is Stacy?

Stacy is a visual arts teacher at Worcester East Middle School in Massachusetts and works with kids that are from lower income areas of the city. Over the years she has received awards and recognition for her work with the community, creating summer art programs and also creating one of largest art fairs in Massachusetts (Start On The Street) which attracts around 20,000 people to the streets of Worcester each fall.

Why are you doing this?

First reason: She's my sister! What better way to honor the work she does, right? I also get to apply my skills to document the whole experience.

What's your plan?

My plan to film Stacy on her misson flights was a success. In Nov 2015 we got to the Stratosphere.  NASA accepted my proposal to create an educational video that tells the story of how a creative arts teacher steps into the world of astronomy science for the first time and how to bring that back into the classroom and implement her experience into a visual arts curriculum for young students.  The filming is complete, now the process of post production begins.

NASA Accepted:

NASA accepted my proposal to film Stacy during the SOFIA flights which happened in late 2015. She flew along with other education ambassadors from around the country to meet, observe and learn from the science teams that conduct research on NASA's stratospheric flights over the northern American continent. The science teams travel in from around the world and have to go through a rigorous application process to have time allotted on the SOFIA aircraft for their research projects.

Money...

Taking on a documentary project incurs a lot of costs. I have buy some equipment like harddrives, audio gear, along with all the incidentals that go along with any video project.

As it stands right now I’m looking at $5000 to bring the project to a final edit in 2016. That’s not a lot of time to do a documentary like this so it's all going to good use!

I hope you can contribute to my project because you’ll be paying it forward to the students at the Worcester East Middle School and the science teams in the SOFIA program.

Thanks for supporting my project!

- Jason Lord