For Mental Health Awareness Week 2017, we went about creating a video to support the occasion. We find that one of the main issues with mental health is how undetectable it can be.

Director/Camera/Editor – Seb Cox
Camera Assistant – Sulekha Kaur Takhtar
Runner – Olivia Symonds

Music: Kai Engel – Harbor

The visual approach was designed not to pity those struggling with mental health, but to observe the similarities and blending them into the everyday.  To express this, the video was created using the style of street videography to get a realistic day-to-day life of students on campus, using a zoom lens to be nonintrusive. This detached documentary was used to demonstrate the realism of the problem. People will go about their days without others being aware of their internal battles.

In post-production, the shots were graded in Davinci Resolve and drawn over in stop motion using Photoshop to make the subject’s head a scribble.

We even made a tutorial for you to create a similar effect on your own portraits.