Group: 6th October-Concept Development

Today we further developed our concept. We have decided that we definitely want our main character to have bi-polar. We therefore decided to look into this disorder more, this way we could accurately portray some of the disorders characteristics accurately in our video:
 'Bipolar disorder, also known as bipolar affective disorder (and originally called manic-depressive illness), is a mental disorder characterized by periods of elevated mood and periods of depression. The elevated mood is significant and is known as mania or hypomania depending on the severity or whether there is psychosis. During mania an individual feels or acts abnormally happy, energetic, or irritable. They often make poorly thought out decisions with little regard to the consequences. The need for sleep is usually reduced. During periods of depression there may be crying, poor eye contact with others, and a negative outlook on life. The risk of suicide among those with the disorder is high at greater than 6% over 20 years, while self harm occurs in 30–40%. Other mental health issues such as anxiety disorder and drug misuse are commonly associated.'

From this information we decided to consider more aspects of our video. For example:

- We are going to include certain non-verbal language to depict when the main character is in his elevated mood or periods of depression. We will do this by having him distant from the audience by having him not look at the camera at all and having a neutral expression whilst moving fairly slowly when he is in his depressed state. He will then be dancing expressively and energetically whilst occasionally looking directly into the camera when he is in his highly elevated mood.

- We will also reflect his mood by having the shots of him when he is incredibly joyous to be highly saturated and the shots of him when he is depressed will be black and white.

- We may have a scene I the video in a bedroom to convey his lack of sleep or more probably we show the main character acting around London and the locations we have already planned acting as though he has not had a lot of sleep. We could use make up top show this by making his face paler and adding dark make up under his eyes.

- We have definitely decided to include the location of a rooftop to portray the increased risk of suicide and self harm during his period of depression.