Raquel Braz da Silva

During the Better Lives unit, one thing I could see that was common in all the themes one way or the other was mental health. If we were talking about sustainability there was always a sense of anxiety in the air or if we were talking about diversity and representation in the industry, I just couldn’t stop thinking about all the wrongdoings this industry has done and the mental illness it probably has caused on a huge amount of people. Lastly, the theme of social responsibility represents the need for doing better in this industry which made me decide to focus my final work on wellness and mental health awareness.

In one of our classes, our tutor talked about how the British Film Institute would not give funding for projects that had villains with disfigurements. I could easily see the connection between this idea of “if someone has a disfigurement then they are evil” with “if someone has mental illness than they are insane”. These ignorant remarks have been going on for a long time in every other movie that is released.

So, I decided to create a character that is set in a dimension just like ours but the need for mental awareness made the government create a vaccine that makes people extremely aware of their mental health by having colored pigments show up in their faces.

The characters in this dimension when struggling with mental illness shows different colored pigments just like thermal scanners. Each color pallet that appears on the face represents a different type of mental illness. The one showing in this particular character (see images below) are blue and purple, meaning she is severely depressed. I picked blue because of the idea of “feeling blue” when someone is feeling down. Purple because it has red and blue pigments mixed demonstrating the urgency, red usually means emergency and danger, and blue because of the reason previously described. The image shows when the character’s mental health is at its worse. It would start with almost unnoticeable blue pigments like it’s under the skin and then grow to this (the image represented below) if the character doesn’t get help. The makeup itself looks like it’s deteriorating, fading away, it’s meant to translate some of the feelings the character would feel with their mental illness. There is a certain fragility in the make-up it feels almost as you can scratch it off and that’s meant to represent the self-harm that sometimes happens when someone is mentally ill.

Only the character would be able to see it. Since one of the big statements people have against mental health is that “if you can’t see it, it’s not real”, so it’s still invisible to everyone else but not for the character just like in our dimension.

I believe that if this was our reality, it would be somewhat of an extreme reminder to see if you are doing well or if you need to get help. It would also make us think twice if we should reach out to someone if we see them struggling.