Out of Your Head

The above shows the final outcome of this project.

As mentioned in the reflection above, this project aims to be a documentary for the treatment of mental illness. Motivated by a friend’s experience who is a victim of sexual abuse, I feel really unfair for her to receive misunderstanding and unacceptance so I decided to record her way to recovery. I really hope that people can tolerate and be more willing to help her instead of the discrimination against mental illness patients.

The first story was framed as the main character awakening 4 personalities, inspired by my friend’s story about the DID symptoms she experienced, but I felt it went against my original intention. I wanted to document what she was going through rather than give an end to her suffering.

Therefore, I decided to give this story an ending that would show more of her constant struggle in the deep valley of despair.
She has tried countless times to fight the demons in her memory and various ways to make up for her childhood. Both her childhood and victimization experiences affected her a lot, so I decided to use a more brutal image to express this continuous process of trying. I was influenced by the creative writing session and used accumulated bodies to represent her attempts. At the top of the pyramid of corpses lies the symbol of her childhood.

I studied Adobe Premiere’s editing effects and the use of plug-ins during the production process. I tried the plug-in called sapphire distort to create a shaky and vibrating shot while running, and the transitions were various effects in the original system..

The initial sound was recordings of our own character’s gasps, footsteps, etc. to match the images and to achieve an intense atomsphere, but we figured that the sound effects were not as effective as a rhythmic piece of music to generate the wanted atmosphere, so I invited a friend who experts in piano to help us with the music. I told him that I wanted the hesitation to be intense, ending abruptly in a jumble of sounds to be heard and felt in the composition, in order to give the ending images a more stunning effect.

This is what I would like to record during the process and please check out Kyle Jing’s blog as well for her contribuion to this project for the photography and 3D modeling process in this film.