The purpose I am writing this post is extremely specific,
and I don’t want anyone to misunderstand why I am making the choices I am.
After conducting a private interview with a classmate, who will remain anonymous
out of respect, I have fully come to terms with the way I will represent my
character and his episodes. Below is the interview, which was conducted
verbally and which I took notes on supervised by the subject. In order to make my notes decipherable,
the answers he provided will be paraphrased (the subject approves all
information in it).
1) How would you
characterize you disorder? How did you develop the disorder (physical
experience or emotional)?
It
was a culmination of two experiences, one physical and one predominantly
emotional. Growing up, he was severely bullied during school and endured both
physical and emotional abuse almost every day. He described it as truly
horrific for any person, let alone a child in elementary and middle school. He
would come home with black eyes, and the emotional trauma proved to be even
worse. Recently, he experienced a traumatic car accident, and which added to
his already developed and diagnosed Anxiety Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder.
2) What triggers
your episodes?
Contrary
to popular belief, these episodes usually occur with no outside stimulus.
Imagine a mundane, ordinary day, even complete silence, and being left alone to
your thoughts. It is primarily thoughts and memories that trigger episodes;
being left to your own personal and traumatized psyche is the primary trigger.
Seeing images and people associated with the event also have an effect, and can
trigger episodes, but the second primary trigger that he revealed to me was seeing
others in similar situations. There is an overwhelming sense of empathy that
stems from relatability.
3) How long do
your episodes last?
The
way in which he personally experiences them varies. In reality, an episode
lasts a couple of seconds, but in his mind it can feel like hours as if he were
reliving the experience. A good analogy would be the structure of a dream, how
scientifically dreams are meant to last seconds at a time but when they are
experienced that can seem over the course of the entire night. However, there
is also the type of episode that occurs in flashes. Regardless of the length,
he stressed how his episodes were unprecedentedly sensorial. The episodes were
exactly like the reality he experienced.
4) How would you
describe your physical responses when you go through this?
Personally,
he described his physical mannerisms as being noticeably tense and anxious. He
scrunches up his face, particularly his upper eye region, tensing his eyelids.
He exhibits the typical anxious mannerisms, such as touching his neck and his
hands, and he stressed how he took deep breaths as if he had difficulty
breathing. These are three different types of physical responses that
consistently occur for him simultaneously.
5) Does it
happen most often when you’re awake or asleep?
He
explains that he is usually awake when he has his episodes. He used to
experience nightmares years ago but they stopped after he attended therapy. He
felt very strongly about therapy, claiming that the sessions helped him and
expressing that he feels everyone should have a therapist in the sense that
they are completely free to let go. He stressed though that there are numerous
different kinds of treatments and that it has to be catered to the individual
to be effective.
6) What do you
see and hear and feel during a specific episode?
When
describing his episodes he has had regarding the car accident, he describes
that they come in the form of either watching from above looking down on the
scene or reliving it first personal. He has never experienced an episode where
he was outside of the scene or witnessing it as a third person. The sounds were
described as highly realistic as well, and the subject described them as
stings, in media studies terms.
He
also explained that originally, he could not remember many of the aspects of
the event, as if he had repressed parts of it or as if it were a blur, but that
the more he dealt with the issue the more of the event he recalled.
Overall,
the interviewee seemed comfortable and content with his state after all of his
progress learning to deal with these disorders, but he stressed how frightening
each experience is and how traumatic it is to continue to relive such an
experience over and over again.
I had the original intention of filming tonight, but some complications came up so instead I decided to start focusing on the editing. I have about 15 minutes of footage total for both realist sections, which is both a blessing and a curse. There's more than enough footage to create the scene exactly as I envisioned it, better actually, but there are too many pivotal moments for me to fit everything I wanted into only two minutes. The main problem I keep encountering is differences in lighting between shots; between a few different sequences, we had to adjust our source of lighting (a small bedside lamp that one of the actors would carry when the other was on screen, or that would be balanced behind the TV in the case that both actors were in the shot) which makes it a little difficult to properly put together with my minimal editing softwares. Currently I'm using iMovie, but luckily Nik Collections by Google has just been released for free! I'm going to play with it to see if and how I can edit video footage. Hopefully I won't have to take it frame by frame but if I feel like its necessary and I have enough time that's exactly what I'll do. For now though I'm simply trying to avoid those shots or find unintended alternative shots that fit the scene.
