Who We Are came about after a particularly bad week. I can't quite remember the details and even if I could I probably wouldn't share them but the main gist is that a lot of my friends and people I care very deeply about were struggling with life. One of those people was my best friend Max who came up with the project after getting through a tough couple of weeks.
We have both known each other since birth and because of this, communication is fairly easy between us. While going through rough patches regarding mental health is never easy, I imagine the load is lightened a little when somebody can understand what is happening without you needing to explain. It had become apparent to him that communication is often the missing link to others understanding mental illness, not helped by it's dramatisation and glamorisation in the media and online.
I had a similar thought myself not long beforehand when somehow during a long bus journey back from a college trip Max managed to articulate to me what his worst days were like. He did it in a very long-winded and convoluted way but therein lies the issue. People won't be able to understand what it's like to live with mental health issues when the mental health issues themselves often prohibit communication at least in its most conventional forms. Mental illness isn't something easily explained more often expressed through art or other creative outputs.
Max wanted to explore this through a film project and of course I was happy to collaborate.
1. Brainstorming and Planning
One of the things we wanted to challenge collectively was the portrayal of mental health in films. For clarification mental health isn't the same as mental illness. Everybody has Mental health just as we all have physical health. Depression, anxiety and OCD are examples of mental illnesses and the severity of these vary from person to person, lifestyle to lifestyle which often creates a barrier to discussion. Everybody's experiences with mental health are individual to them.
While representation is improving, mental illnesses are often either romanticised, generalised or stereotyped. We were determined from the get go that our project couldn't be a drama and it couldn't be something written by one person. We wanted the input of real people expressing how their mental health affects their day-to-day lives, and not just the darkest moments but the everyday existence as well, something we very rarely get to see and understand.
So we started asking around for poems. At first we approached friends and family before sending out emails through college asking for anonymous poems or monologues about their experience with mental health. The support and eagerness to contribute to the project has been fantastic. Over the first few months of starting the project we received a variety of beautifully written, emotive and expressive poems. Some writers were interested in reading them out themselves others, understandably, wanted to keep their anonymity. Those poems we dedicated to a series of brilliant readers who wanted to support the project.
2. Production
As with all productions there are hurdles to overcome. As the biggest project we've done on our own back Who We Are presented a challenge technically and mentally. For the first time we had to carefully timetable, schedule and move around to accommodate a large number of people. Since we were using college facilities we also had that to consider. The amount of support we received from college from our film tutors, technicians, friends and the college council has honestly been invaluable and the project wouldn't have reached completion without it.
At the beginning of the project Max and I had clearly defined roles. He was the director and I was cinematographer, sometimes with a third friend (Josh) to control the second camera so Max was free to focus on reader performance. As the project went on these roles started to cross over as I think all collaborations do to the point where our clearly defined rolls were looking a bit like spaghetti junction and from here-on in it's hard to tell who had which idea!
Originally I had wanted to do something a bit more artistic until Max persuaded me that something simple and stripped back would be more impactful. We didn't want to sensationalise the words, just bring them to life a little. We settled on a simple three light (Sometimes four light) set up in the college theatre where we would ask our reader to sit, stand or move as we felt the poem demanded.
Before each shoot day, we would read through the poem and discuss what kind of camera angles we wanted to use. Does this person talk about isolation? If so then wide to extreme wide angles in the black space might help visualise that. Is this person hyperactive or distracted. In that case how do we use sound and tight, quick cuts to show the build of anxiety or paranoia? Does this poem require any change in angles at all as we did with a depression poem? We shot that poem in one take and decided to keep it that way because we felt it didn't need the cuts.
Part of this process for me was looking at artwork online and from friends which helped me to understand the headspace of different mental illnesses. Most of these poems are difficult to label as simply one mental illness so what you're seeing is wholly based on the person's words.
3. Performance
As previously mentioned, not everyone who wrote a poem wanted to read it out. In-fact the majority of readers did not write the poem they perform but were willing to take part in the project. As such we wanted to cast people that seemed genuine. This also allowed us to cast a more even number of men.
Men talking about mental health has become a big discussion recently and unsurprisingly we received a lot more poems from women than we did from men. Since none of the poems, we felt, were gender specific we managed to get three male readers involved in the hope that seeing men talking about their mental health will show that it's not a sign of weakness and that mental illness doesn't discriminate and can affect anyone.
One regret I have from the project is that we weren't able to include more diversity, most of this is due to a lack of time meaning a lot of the poems were performed by people we knew last minute who in our case are disproportionately white women. If we were to do the project again I know we would make more of an effort to use people outside of our own social circle.
4. Healthy Head
Since the beginning of the project we have had continued support from an organisation known as Healthy Head, set up from an old friend of mine who agreed to write a poem for and be in the film. While I do want to gush about her and healthy head in a separate Facebook post I will say the film wouldn't be possible without her support and encouragement.
5. Post- production
Editing this piece has been a long and frustrating process mostly because I was not a very experienced editor when I started to put it together. Editing this film has been the best education in editing I could have asked for especially in regards to cleaning audio, subtle colour grading and overall fx work. Some of the audio is frustratingly still not as clear as I would like mostly down to my inexperience using a mic, different tricks we would pick up the more we used the equipment.
To conclude...
This film has been a wonderful experience to be a part of. It's been draining at times, physically and mentally but I am so proud of what we've been able to create. It's not perfect, not polished, but it is honest to the words people have written. While I know our reach is limited I hope this project inspires others to try different forms of communication to spread the word about mental health. I hope somebody out there can point to our film or one of the clips and say to somebody else "That's what it's like, that's how I feel" for them to understand the day to day lifestyles of people who find communication difficult. I hope it inspires creativity through art and poetry and people find this openness and vulnerability to talk as a strength rather than a weakness.