One in a Crowd: Life Without Color

There are many disabilities in this world: some obvious, some more hidden, some more and some less debilitating. Some are written off by those that don't suffer from them as nothing more than a minor inconvenience. New Austin-based documentary Life Without Color takes a fresh look at one of those underestimated disabilities, color blindness.

What the filmmakers hope to explore is how much not being able to tell red from green affects everyday life. Imagine not discerning whether it's safe to turn at traffic lights, or worrying about picking out mismatched clothes, or struggling to tell if fruit is off. Color is also a huge influencer of mood, so there are real emotional and mental repercussions for some.

On top of that, there are jobs that are just off the table, and Life Without Color explores people whose dreams are shattered because of their condition. It becomes particularly crushing for people who have never realized that they have this disability, until a particular test – to become an astronaut, or fight fires, or drive trains, or fly planes, or paint – shuts down their chosen career path. But it's also a film about hope and about solutions, as the University of Washington Medicine Eye Institute uses gene therapy to help open doors that were closed.

With 20 days to go, the film is just over a third of the way to hitting its Kickstarter goal of $30,000. Director/producer Robb Jacobson, who is partially color-impaired himself, explained, "While $30,000 is the minimum we need to produce the film at a quality level I would be proud to present, any amount over the $30,000 we raise here will go towards making it an even more polished product as well as creating avenues for distributing it more widely to the world."

Find out more about the film at www.lifewithoutcolorfilm.com, or you can back production via their Kickstarter page.

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One in a Crowd is a series intended to showcase Texas film and tech projects that are crowdfunding their way to a goal, be it distribution, a prototype, or production costs. If you have a project that we should know about, email us at filmflam@austinchronicle.com.