Help Us Complete Heart Beat: Music Saved My Life

Help us raise the first $150,000 toward the $500,000 needed to complete Heart Beat: Music Saved My Life, a five-episode documentary series exploring music, healing, and human connection.

Heart Beat is a fiscally sponsored project of Far Away, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Your gift is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

If music has ever helped you through a hard chapter of your life, you already understand why we are making Heart Beat.

Heart Beat: Music Saved My Life is a cinematic documentary series exploring how music and sound can support healing and bring people together. We have spent years capturing the stories behind that possibility. Now we are asking for your help to complete five episodes and bring them to audiences.

Our current fundraising goal is $150,000. This is the first phase of the $500,000 needed to finish the five-episode series. The full project budget is $700,000: $500,000 for production and completion, plus $200,000 for an impact and outreach campaign that includes screenings, festivals, and community and educational programs.

The journey behind Heart Beat

In April 2012, I survived a helicopter crash in Guatemala that left me with a broken back, memory loss, and a long physical and emotional recovery. Surgery and rehabilitation helped me walk again, but rebuilding my life was a much longer journey.

More than a year later, a week surrounded by music, movement, nature, and community changed the course of that journey. My pain and outlook shifted. I began to reconnect with life in a way I had struggled to find since the crash.

That experience became a question I wanted to explore with my camera: How can music help us heal? Heart Beat grew from that question into a shared journey with people whose lives, work, and care for others are deeply connected to music.

Why This Story. Why Now?

We are living through a time of loneliness, anxiety, burnout, and disconnection. Research and clinical practice are exploring what many cultures have understood for generations: music can play a profound role in healing and human connection.

The music therapists and clinicians we filmed use music in their work with people facing pain, stress, and difficult recoveries. Heart Beat does not claim music is a cure or a replacement for medical treatment. It explores music's role in care, comfort, and connection. From the primal beat of a drum to the rhythm of our own heartbeat, music speaks to something deeply human.

Heart Beat explores music as one of our oldest inheritances and a vital part of our future. Our ambition is to deepen understanding, encourage informed conversations about music in healthcare, and inspire people to come together through music.

The stories are already here

We have filmed music therapy at the NYU Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy and work involving music in clinical and critical-care settings at Georgetown University and MedStar Health. We have explored the visible patterns of sound in John Stuart Reid's cymatics laboratory and listened to people who trusted us with some of the most difficult chapters of their lives.

Early donors helped make our most recent shoots in New York and Washington, D.C. possible. Their support is already part of what audiences will see. The series follows five musical movements: Rhythm, Sound, Melody, Harmony, and Re-Tuning.

I bring more than 25 years of filmmaking experience to Heart Beat, including work for National Geographic and the BBC. This series brings that experience to a subject that changed my own life.

The Part You Play

Like a symphony, Heart Beat takes many people to bring it to life. Your contribution helps turn years of filmed stories into a cinematic journey, shaped through editing, original music, and sound that audiences can feel.

Your contribution helps fund:

• Editing and story development, plus remaining filming and key interviews.
• Original music, sound design, and the final audio mix.
• Reenactments and visualizations that help audiences understand sound.
• Music and archival licensing, color grading, and final picture finishing.
• Legal clearances, mastering, distribution preparation, and educational and community outreach.

You help give these stories their finished form—and the chance to reach someone who needs them. Someone rebuilding after an accident, carrying grief, or searching for connection may recognize something of themselves and discover how music can help carry us through life's hardest chapters.

Help bring Heart Beat to audiences

We welcome people, families, and foundations who want to help this work reach others. Contributions of every size matter. Major contributions of $10,000, $25,000, $50,000, or $100,000 and above can help us reach the current $150,000 goal and move the series closer to completion.

We are asking for philanthropic support. Donations do not confer ownership, financial returns, or creative control. With your permission, we would be honored to acknowledge your support in the credits or on our donor page. Anonymous contributions are also welcome.

Please help us complete Heart Beat and bring that possibility to audiences.

To discuss a major contribution or support through a foundation, contact info@heartbeatthefilm.com. You can also help by sharing this page with someone who cares about music, healing, or human connection.

Thank you to everyone who has shared their story and everyone who has helped us get this far.

With gratitude,
Michael Boidy and the Heart Beat team