She began by identifying black student-athletes at peer institutions and inviting them to submit answers to a number of questions surrounding the areas she wanted to explore. She received 16 thoughtful, gripping and heartfelt responses from student-athletes at Cornell, as well as schools like Brown, Yale, Michigan and Colgate. She interjected some of her own thoughts and capped it off with an expert interview.
With all of that complete, Gundy used powerful narrative clips and carefully selected music to put together a rough cut. When it was complete, she had compiled a 90-minute documentary.
Gundy understood that an hour and a half piece would be hard to digest, and an early idea to break it into chapters made sense. To do that, she understood it would have to be tightened up. Like many creatives, she needed to hand off some control to edit it down. Enter Max Brandt, who built the intro, and Gillian Harrill, who did much of the heavy lifting on the creative editing front. The two helped Gundy weave together a story told by her peers.
When it was over, a sleeker 56-minute video, broken down into her five chosen topics, was ready to go.
Gundy started by releasing a trailer in August of 2020, followed by a serial release of one episode per week over a month beginning in September. Each chapter was approximately 10 minutes. The entire documentary, from start to finish, ran just over 56 minutes.
Her teammates were supportive, sharing the video on social media platforms. Along with a group discussion on the Netflix documentary "13th" regarding the prison system, mass incarceration and its link to racial inequality, the team also watched Gundy's documentary.
"I'm so fortunate to have lovely teammates on the Cornell women's lacrosse team," Gundy said in the documentary. "But I do represent the only person of color. There isn't anybody I can look over to and say 'oh, you feel the same way as me', or 'you get it' or 'am I crazy for thinking XYZ'. There's no one else I can look to do that because I'm the only one."
