Hi. My name is Zach. That is my English teacher. Showing us his toes. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. To understand how we got here, we must go to the very beginning...
How Did We Get Here?
October 2nd, 2024. The time is somewhere between 9:17 and 10:57am on a peaceful Wednesday morning at Cypress Bay High School. Our AICE Media teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa, was giving us our first lesson on documentaries. Here we are, learning all of the basics about documentaries, when Stoklosa stops and says, "Hold on guys. This isn't related to anything but... do you guys have a problem with feet?". I'm roughly paraphrasing here, but our teacher definitely got her answer as the class literally erupted with a wave of grossed-out teenagers who most definitely had a problem with feet.
Stoklosa was utterly confounded about why pretty much all of her students had an issue with feet. Understandably so, because in the end feet are just body parts, and there's literally nothing explicit about them. As the members of our class tried explaining how feet are gross and weird looking, our teacher just couldn't seem to wrap her head around feet being such a, for lack of a better term, "taboo" thing for teenagers.
The very strange thing was that even us, the toe-hating teenagers, were unable to come up for any explanation for why we are so grossed out by our bottom-most body part. This lead to, without exaggeration, a very heated debate on possible explanations for this phenomenon. My friend Victoria was especially interested in this debate. She said that she found it so fascinating how an entire group of people can turn such an ordinary thing into something to avoid. I saw Vic was so obviously captivated by this, and me, being the naturally hilarious person that am I, said as joke "You should make a documentary on this." The class laughed at my vey funny and humorous comment. Expect for Vic. Who took me completely seriously.
Her words, not mine.
Vic literally took out her notebook and started writing down ideas for how she could possibly do this doc. I started suggesting some ideas of my own, and before we knew it we had a very rough plan for how it could possibly happen. Obviously we would never do that though, it's such a weird idea. I remember thinking to myself, "I wonder if Vic will actually do that idea. If she does, there's no way in hell I'm helping her".
Flash forward to the day the project is assigned. My friend Daniella and I are a little unsure of what we would want to make our documentary on. Then we make the mistake of locking eyes with Victoria. We looked back at the notes that were written down. The more we talked about it , the more ideas that were surprisingly good we came up with. Then Stoklosa literally said out loud, "I will be so sad if no one makes the foot documentary". Welp, since she was literally begging us, we really had no choice but to make it. (Stoklosa would later claim that she was joking, but I refuse to believe that. The look of excitement on her face when we decided our topic showed us everything).
Research on the Topic
The first and arguably most important step of the pre-production is researching about your topic. It was in this stage, however, when I noticed that this documentary might be more interesting that I first thought. It was a pretty well-documented topic,(our teacher first discovered it in a John Oliver segment), and we were able to find plenty of articles explaining the weird phenomenon that was younger people's disgust towards feet. We found a variety of articles explaining that this is a widespread thing. From all of our research online (and independent studies, more on that later), it seemed that disgust towards feet was primarily a gen-z issue.
Some articles we used that gave us some interesting points of view. A HuffPost article said that many people in younger generations consciously avoid wearing open-toed shoes in public. It said that even younger brides getting married refuse to wear open-toed shoes, in fear of having their feet in photos.
A few of the articles that we found suggested that one of the possible reasons for gen-z's adversity to feet is our generation's awareness of the fairly new ability for anyone to sell their feet pics online. Believe it or not, people can make some genuinely good money online selling pictures of their feet on the internet. The theory is that gen-z is aware that people could fetishize their feet, and so teenagers prefer to hide their feet from that possibility.
A really interesting statistic we found was from an interesting website, FeetFinder. It's apparently one of the most popular websites to find pictures of feet. Their data shows that gen-z has the highest level of foot fetishes compared to every other generation, which is a little strange since it's the generation that appears to hate feet the most.
Here's the thing...
That isn't a bad theory at all. We thought that that was going to be our conclusion for the documentary. That was until we started asking people in our class why they individually felt uncomfortable about feet, and not a single person stated that as being the cause. There were a variety of different reasons people told us, but it was still strange We realized that there is some different reason that was causing an entire generation to dislike feet, and there is absolutely no awareness of it...
Planning for the Doc
We decided that the overall route that we wanted to take was to start with showcasing how gen-z's aversion to feet was in fact a big thing. We thought a really cool way to show this would be a Man On The Streets. By asking a bunch of different people, we could get a variety of ages that would hopefully showcase how it is only a gen-z issue. This would mean we would have to go around our town showing random people pictures of feet and getting their opinions on it, but the fact that that scared us so badly shows how weird gen-z is.
After showcasing it was a thing, we would then transition to what gen-z's dislike of feet shows about society and societal norms, as we believed that is the real message people could take away from this. We made up a list of a few different people, ranging from teachers with degrees in sociology and psychology to tell us their theories about it, and members of g-zen to explain their disliking of feet.
We decided that the piece should end off having the audience thinking about society and their own lives, possibly wondering what trends they might be unknowingly following.
Most importantly, we decided on the title: "Does This Make You Uncomfortable?". This I actually came up with on the very first day we joked about making this doc, because I think it would make such a good poster/title screen if shown with a picture of feet.
Now that we had a concrete plan and structure, it was time to see if we could actually pull it off...
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