Casting & Location | Production Notes

Casting

When thinking about who I wanted to cast as the female character in my video, I wanted someone who had experience with the illness itself. This was quite tricky to do as, obviously, it's a very personal thing. However, I wanted to show the pureness of the illness and the best way to do that, I thought, was to find someone who knew what it was like and could easily portray that.

The actress I have chosen is one of my close friends, Micaiah. 

I knew she would be good in this role as she has a lot of knowledge on the mental illness, and due to the fact she knows a lot about it, she has the ability to portray that feeling through the visuals and also the audio.

Micaiah is a student, but I wanted someone of that age, not for practicality, but because I wanted to show that anyone of any age can suffer from it. Within the poem Anaxagorou says 'your friends don't answer the phone and your mum's left you in tears again'. This line spoke 'young adult' to me, as she goes through a lot of emotions and it's almost like she relies on her friends and parents for help and love along the way.

Also, after doing research, students or young adults are more likely to go through depression or any other mental illness due to the stress of that time in their lives, or if they had a troubled childhood.

Location

To create a personal and intimate feeling, while also showing isolation, I've decided to shoot most of the footage with my character in a bedroom.

The room will be quite small, so it feels enclosed, but also not a lot of the room will be shot to create the feeling of claustrophobia. 

While also shooting in a small bedroom, I will be shooting outside for the sky scenery in an area that has trees and other features like that in order to create a good sense of depth of field. 

Due to my video being more of a montage, the locations I use will be quite varied, and due to having lots of close-ups of the actress and having shots in the dark, the locations may not be very clear and noticeable. 

This will keep to the depression theme in the video, as when you are suffering with this illness, you don't take any notice of the location you're in, as your brain is foggy and packed with horrible thoughts.