'Insomnia' A short documentary: Finished video

Below is the final cut for my video.

I am very happy with the final product as I feel that it captures insomnia in a light-hearted way and judging by the feedback that I got it was effective and people learnt from it, which was what I was aiming for

'Insomnia' A short documentary

My brother has struggled with insomnia for many years now and so I intended to use him as my art piece, this makes it more personal and therefore I feel it has deeper meaning to it. For the post 16 gallery I wanted to create a film piece based on him and so I began to interview him and collect picture from his childhood.

To the left are the questions that I asked him and my reasoning for choosing those particular questions. My initial plan was to have the film playing over the top of the threaded box, but when I experimented with projecting more over the top of it I realised that the box would take away from the film and the film would also have to be very small, so I chose to just have the film playing in a room on its own, chairs were placed around it in a theatre position and the film was on loop so that any parts of the film would not be missed, I kept the box in the room and used it as an opinion box, I had a sign asking for people to write their opinions on a piece of paper and place it in the box and to the right is some of the feedback that I got

 I began by importing the clips of film that I had using Adobe Premiere Pro, I chose this program because I had worked with it before so I was familiar with it

 I decided to start the film using only sound so that the audience could build up their own picture of what he might look like, adding to the aspect that people will judge before they know, I added a title at the beginning go it and had the pictures cross dissolve into one another so that it would show that the young photos are my brother.

 I decided to add titles at the end to highlight the last line which is ''Fix it, somebody fix it'' I feel that this is the most powerful line in the video, I feel that it sums up the illness and it should have a greater effect on people

I created this video not to pinpoint the illness or to make judgement of it, but I created it in order to educate people.

This is the board I had outside of the room which it was projected in, the room was dark and had chairs placed to make the board the centre piece with a box from a previous piece which people could write their opinions in

Insomnia Workshop

I have began to turn my project to the direction of 'Insomnia' as I feel it is something that has not been explored enough yet, Our class did small workshops based around their topic and I showed students the power-point below and gave them each a box with various utensils and asked them to ''Show how insomnia makes a person feel''

Here are some images of the workshop and the students in progress, when I asked the students how they thought the workshop went, they said they enjoyed it and it helped them to be more confident in just doing rather than thinking to in depth about an idea




Below are some of the final products that were created, they all helped me to think about colour and using products that I found anywhere

Alongside all of this I was still thinking of different things I could do using the perspex box and so I came up with a few ideas.
An idea that I pursued was wrapping it in white thread, we had made a combination piece with a few students where my box had another students images projected over the top of it, which mimicked my layering style, and so I thought a video piece projected over the top of this would be a good combination, which is where the idea for a video piece began...


 

Creating The Process...

I started to look more at Insomnia and looking at different ways to portray the struggle with it, so I created a photo by overlaying two photographs I took (as seen on the left) I darkened the image to create the feeling of it being night, the dull expression shows how the action of struggling for sleep is becoming a laborious task. I really liked the feel of this image and I also realised that Insomnia would be an interesting illness to study as it is one illness where the word is overused but still not understood. I furthered these images by retaking the with the subject showing different emotions an looking in different directions and I photo shopped these together in a similar way that I did with the other emotion pictures.

I also took two images, one of the subject laying back off a chair screaming ( so when turned up the right way it gave the appearance of falling or drowning and another neutral position image, I over laid these two together to show that having insomnia can feel like you are drowning on the inside but you have to just put on a brave face and get on with daily life. I also photographed it underwater to really give the drowning impression, but the ink disintegrated in the water...

To gain some background knowledge about insomnia i created a research page, I research into the causes and treatments and the symptoms that can occur after these treatments begin, I also did a quick search of some artwork that uses insomnia as its theme but nothing I found really stood out for me, this is when I felt like I should take my work onto a more personal level. I knew that my brother had suffered with insomnia for a long period of time and he had never really expressed himself or how it made him feel, so I thought that having him talk about it would hep him find a way to deal with it and it would also give me some more research into what I could do as an art project.

In The Beginning...

To begin with, I did some research in to artists who expressed mental illnesses within their works in different ways, two interesting artists that I found were Adriana Varejao and Natalia Pereira, They both had different background but explored the ways in which the human mind can be mentally distorted.

To explore the work of Varejao I began to look at experimenting with tiles, breaking them up and gluing them onto a large piece of cardboard to create an interesting composition an juxtaposing this with lining them up equally, to show that the same product can create a different feeling based on its composition. I then moved on to working with a larger piece of cardboard,k Approximately A1 sized, I stuck two of these together and opened the centre so it mimicked an explosion, I fill this space with cotton wool balls, fake blood and other materials to gain this flesh like look that Varejao achieves in her work. To further the meaning of this piece I did some research and read some books that contained the theme of mental illness, one of these books was the "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (By the end, the narrator is hopelessly insane, convinced that there are many creeping women around and that she herself has come out of the wallpaper—that she herself is the trapped woman in the wallpaper) and so I photocopied pages of this book among others (The Birds, A Clockwork Orange, 4.48 Psychosis) and created a wallpaper, then painted it with a tinged yellow, this colours would signify the decomposition of the wallpaper, it is also a colour that you could not miss, as a metaphor for how mental illnesses can be so significant to people yet still avoided in society.

To further my work on Pereira I did some photography of another student with string and elastic bands around his face (as seen on the left page) This work shows the struggle that people go through in order to reach perfection in their bodies, but by doing this they are distorting themselves. It also represents how the idea of perfection itself is distorted as it cannot be simply defined. I played around with lighting and position with these photos as first and found that the composition could either make the subject appear as a dominant figure or fairly submissive, which in a way reflects the image of society as you can be a strong or a weak figure when mediated in the public eye. To further this again I experimented with different effects on Photoshop such as the liquefy tool which distorted the image even more. I used the burn tool to darken an image (which is what created the more dominating appearance along with the higher position)  I also used a posterise filter, just to see what other impressions I could create, I felt that this didn't work as well as the image seemed to lose its meaning. 

From this I gained a large interest in photography and the use of layering photos and so I took some more photos focusing more on the emotions that could be expressed with mental illnesses such as depression or schizophrenia and layered them over the top of each other (Images on the right page in the image above) changing the opacity so that each emotion was still visible, these showed the different emotions that people go through are faint (but always still there) and the neutral image is more visible because people don't like to show their true emotions. I photographed the photos again using effects built in in the camera to achieve different effects such as soft light, film grain and a black and white filter, these made the images have a duller tone and feel to them, however it was not my aim to make the images artificial as I was aiming to show the reality of emotions that people go through during issues with mental health. I then printed these images on acetate sheets and began to suspend them over the top of them to begin to create more of an installation piece. I experimented with stitching some of the images together, suspending them inside a perspex box and projecting the images over them again. From this I found I really like the idea of using the perspex box, but I felt I still had to further my ideas.