Boondogglin' || Concerned Citizen Documentary

Boon Dogglin'

Artists' Statement

We decided to focus our project on the works of a great senior citizen, Frank Kay Richards, who knew that “by small and simple things are great things brought to pass” (Alma 37:6). He specializes in making boondoggles and giving them out to family, friends, and strangers of every kind. We decided to film Frank because the service that he does would appear to be on a small-scale. As we learned from Mark Mabry last Thursday, “there is no such thing as a small-scale cause.”

        After interviewing Frank and several members of his family who had been deeply moved by his movement, we came to realize during these interviews that there was nothing small-scale about his cause at all. Frank’s capacity to give and love was evidently limitless. The only difficult part of filming the interviews was getting Frank to tell a brief, concise answer to the questions we gave! There was so much story to tell! Just from observing what we could from the overall footage, there was enough clear and present evidence to prove that there is, in fact, no such thing as a small-scale cause.

The choices we made in editing our piece reflected our initial goal for Frank’s story: to show how his simple acts of kindness could translate into really big, really positive consequences. Though Frank certainly wasn’t running an international non-profit organization to combat poverty, his cause still had great effect to those within his community, like his immediate family, and to those beyond his community. We wanted the focus of our piece to be on those whom he affected and in what ways he affected them, which is why Frank only has one actual speaking line throughout the whole video. We thought it better to fill the time within our video with the voices of those he has influenced, and they seemed to be able to relay Frank’s message of love better than he could through words (perhaps because Frank spreads his love more effectively through boondoggles than he does words).

I think Frank’s story may be well compared to The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. Granted, he sacrificed no physical pieces of himself for the betterment of another like the Giving Tree did for the boy; he did, however, give metaphorical pieces of himself through his boondoggles. Most everyone that we interviewed testified that the boondoggles felt like they held some special part of Frank, like they were tied to frank through the woven threads of his gifts. And as Tye expressed so well at the end of our documentary, his boondoggles communicated love, one of the most precious messages to pass along to others.