Liz Bullard is a speech pathologist who couldn’t find a safe outdoor space for her patients — kids with autism, cerebral palsy, hearing and vision impairments — so she built one herself. From scratch. In a public park. The Seattle Children’s PlayGarden is the only facility of its kind located in a public park in the entire country. That’s who we were working for.
Over the years, we also built their website and helped with fundraising campaigns.
We had already created a fundraiser video for the PlayGarden — something more like a music video. But when we started thinking about doing another one, something didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t want to repeat the same approach. And I definitely didn’t want to fall into the usual formula of interviewing a few adults and turning it into a typical TV-style news piece. That felt predictable — and honestly, a little boring.
The story we were trying to tell had much more depth than that. A music video or a series of adult talking heads just wouldn’t capture what the PlayGarden truly means.
This realization came after conducting several interviews with adults. They were thoughtful and could have made a solid piece, especially paired with all the beautiful B-roll we were capturing. But it still felt like we were missing something essential.
That’s when the idea clicked: instead of centering adults, we should interview the kids themselves — including those who are non-verbal — as well as their siblings. They are the ones who experience the PlayGarden most directly, and their perspectives could reveal something far more authentic and powerful.
There was a bit of hesitation at first — some understandable concern about how it would work. But Geoff and Bill, our cameraman, immediately saw the potential. They understood that if we could pull it off, it wouldn’t just be another video — it would be something truly meaningful, something that genuinely speaks for the PlayGarden and everything it provides.
Turns out kids can express themselves with smiles, with affection, with words nobody expected them to find. The siblings said things that no adult narrator ever could. We got everything we needed and more.
I sweated through the edit. Years of working at the county TV station had taught me that garbage in does not have to be garbage out, and I leaned on every bit of that experience pulling it together. When it was done Liz watched it over and over again in her car.
That year the PlayGarden raised $50,000 more than their usual fundraiser.
What she built went beyond an organization — a one-acre garden full of real food, animals, a giant caterpillar carved from living shrubs, and room for every kind of kid to just be a kid. Joy, in abundance, for families who didn’t always have it in abundance. Liz has dedicated her career to building something enormous, a unique and challenging venture to benefit the lives of others. We were just lucky enough to help tell that story.