Skip to main content

Mental Health in Film

The focus for my research topic has shifted this semester and it's something I find very interesting and I think effects a large portion of the audience that might see my film. I'm looking into Mental Health in film; how it is portrayed and how it is received by audiences. For this I conducted an interview with a profession in psychology with an interest in mental health in film.

I already had my own opinions about how mental health is portrayed in films but listening to her helped broaden my understanding and knowledge of what we see as mental health and what films are showing it. Yes, there are lots of films that show mental health in a negative light, but there are so many more that I hadn't even thought about that show the even though people may suffer from mental health, they are still people: They still have their own goals and personalities. They are not defined by their illness.

This topic is massive and I have barely scratched the surface but by creating my presentation and pulling together all of my research I feel far more informed than I did a few months ago.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cure - Advanced Skeleton 5

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well. So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point.  There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model. Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step! The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the de

Cure - Unity Timeline

I think I've said this before, but the Unity Timeline is fantastic! (Despite not playing sound). It works very similarly to Premiere Pro, a software I'm familiar with enough to transfer the skills over to Unity. For my final film, I imported my animation one file at a time and made sure they were set up correctly in the timeline before moving onto the next import. As I'm using alembic cache, I have to have a new model for each animation so after speaking to my classmate Diebrig, she told me that I can use an activation track to switch the geometry off and on which is much easier than animating it off and on. So my general timeline for 1 shot looks something like this: Now, in this first shot, the character loses two polygons which are separate cached objects meaning they need their own tracks. The first green track is an activation track for the duration that this walk cycle animation is running. The next track is the alembic cache of the walk cycle animation. The wh

A Quiet Place

Earlier in the week I went to see A Quiet Place and as someone that doesn't watch a lot of horror films, it was not what I expected. The premise of A Quiet Place is pretty simple: There are monster out there and if you make a sound, they'll come for you and it's safe to say that I have never felt more tense in a cinema (And on a side note, that was the quietest cinema I have every been in). The film's main dialogue comes from sign language with a few rare vocalised sentences. This means, for the most part, that we're focused on how the characters move, how they act rather than what they say and I was shocked at how quickly I felt attached to the characters: I didn't want them to be in this situation, I wanted them to be safe but, shockingly, they weren't. The pace of the film is just enough to make you think that there's a safe respite ahead and there are gaps in the chaos before a sound crashes through the screen snapping you awake. There are m