Our target audience for this work is practicing psychiatrists in the United States. The film and its message are relevant to these specific healthcare professionals because they are actively treating schizophrenia patients in a variety of care settings, including private practice, inpatient units, and community mental health clinics.

Every single cinematography choice was made to bring audiences closer to the lived experience of psychosis.

We chose to transition from scene to scene by craning downward, using a literal “falling camera” as our core technique for expressing this narrative of decline. And we used many other shot types—from handheld to SnorriCam—to convey the feeling of a world constantly in flux, since patients struggle to find stability when symptoms are uncontrolled.

Isolation is a defining feature of this illness, so we chose a claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio to help audiences feel it. And we shot our hero mostly in closeups with shallow depth of field to visually isolate her from her environments. These repeated closeups foreground the human impact of schizophrenia, not its clinical symptoms.

All these techniques were carefully chosen to portray our hero as a person who is suffering and in need of better care.