The Other You

"The Other You" is a film about finding the beauty in your own way of being. We all fall somewhere on the spectrum of happiness and dissatisfaction as well as society’s self-imposed standard of normality. Feeling trapped in a world where everyone wants to "fit in" makes it hard to appreciate our own unique perspectives of ourselves and the world around us.
The vision for this film is to portray a young woman who is very much ending the childhood phase of her life and is trying to turn the corner to adulthood. She could presumably be the girl in my first short, all grown up (https://vimeo.com/252685098). She’s just having to go through the final phase of figuring out who she is.
Obviously, when you become an adult new pressures and responsibilities start to creep into your life. The main character in "The Other You", Amelia, struggles from dissociation, depersonalization, and derealisation, but I want to steer away from labelling these “disorders” because it puts such a negative spin on them. They are things that people certainly struggle with when they don’t understand them, and I would never want to simplify, minimize, or claim to fully understand what they are going through.
However, we endeavoured to create a perspective as close to that experience as possible. Nearly every description of dissociation, depersonalization, and derealisation can be portrayed cinematically (extreme brightness/darkness, blurriness, 3rd person perspectives, locked-on camera shots, morphing, etc.) and we took guidance from a team member who has DD.
The film is divided into 2 kinds of perspectives. A.) Firstly, a world which we are all familiar with in most films. Standard shots consisting of wides, mediums, close-ups, etc, without any stylized lighting or forced perspective. B.) Secondly, from Amelia’s point-of-view when she starts to dissociate. In these cases, we almost feel reality tear away; audio is greatly muffled/echoed and things start to shift out of normal coherence. A big inspiration for this style of filmmaking would be "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" when Joel is having his memory erased.
Lastly, but most important is the tone of the film. We wanted it to feel a bit strange at first as if the audience is being introduced to an alien life. Time does not sync up, the music is actually played in reverse and we will feel as if we ourselves have “woken up” with dissociation, depersonalization, and/or derealisation. The audience may not connect with Amelia at first, and may even be frustrated to begin with by her kooky father and foreboding mother, but by seeing her interactions with her best friend, Sam, we hopefully come to love her for her patience and determination. It becomes clearer and clearer that she can’t help it, but she doesn’t want to be a victim; instead, she just keeps fighting against the current. It’s almost as if time itself is stopping around her and the universe is to blame for the missing parts of her life. Slowly we begin to piece together what she’s going through and see a light at the end of the tunnel. Embracing her dissociation, depersonalization, and derealisation through the senses, she manages to seize onto her very life essence and channel it with the help of her inner self.