Olivia makes regular trips to the seaside where she spends time with her brother Jordan; who helps her overcome the grief suppressed in the back of her mind.
Olivia skips school to go down to the seaside where she plays with her older brother Jordan.
As she spends more time with her brother she notices that he begins to distance himself from her.
‘Sea Side’ is a short film directed by Sebastian (Seb) Cox in 2014 for a sixth form college project. Since then, the film has been touring at twelve film festivals around the UK, America and France, and winning multiple film awards.
SPOILERS AND BACK STORY
Sea Side is about how family members and close friends react emotionally to someone’s suicide. The film is designed to tackle the issue of suicide from its borders, rather than seeing someone’s suicide through, we experience their decision through the people around them.
In the planning stages of Sea Side, I spoke to people who had either experienced suicide through a family relative or friend or had come close/attempted their own suicide. From this point, I broke down the emotions that someone in this state of mind would feel into a consecutive list of emotions. From here, each emotion was drawn and visualised. Hence, was then adapted so that each visual element appeared in the film consecutively. This was done as an attempt to get the audience to feel the emotions of a suicidal person whilst watching the film.
Suicide should be a very difficult topic to make a film about if done correctly. In Sea Side, we want you to feel the emotions of someone in that state of mind as an attempt to empathise with them; making people more aware of how to treat the situations in the appropriate manner.
Despite the heavy topic of Sea Side, we hope that you get something from it constructively. Whether it makes you more capable to relate to those who are feeling suicidal and to help guide them from their perspective. Or it helps you see that there are others around you that will be effected but at the same time, how we are trying to understand and help. You are not alone and you shouldn’t feel that you are.