A young woman tosses in her sleep. She mindlessly flips TV channels. She reads, trying to pass the time. She lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, when suddenly she begins to fall.

In a classroom, she struggles to concentrate. The words from a lesson projected on-screen start to rearrange themselves. She glances to see if anyone notices this.

We fall into a hardware store. The young woman stares at the security camera above her. A cluster of TV screens all show her face. Her eyes dart from screen to screen, paranoid.

In her kitchen now, she swirls with delusion, her mind racing uncontrollably.

In an inpatient ward, she stares blankly at a TV. The nurse turns it off, and…

The young woman falls helplessly through a void.

A call to action appears, urging psychiatrists to take early, comprehensive action to prevent the decline they’ve just witnessed.

Healthcare professionals are used to announcer voiceovers clearly telling them what we want them to know and how we want them to think and act.

But the goal of this film was to make psychiatrists feel what their patients go through outside their care. So the traditional AVO sell had no place here.

We used sound as a way of plunging audiences into our hero’s shoes, hearing—and therefore feeling—exactly what she does. Auditory hallucinations are a hallmark symptom of schizophrenia, so the sound design mimicked a racing mind at war with itself to capture the chaotic interiority of living with this illness. Heavy breathing was used as an external manifestation of this internal stress.

A slow, haunting custom score plays underneath the increasingly frenetic wall of whispers, adding tonal layers of melancholy and discord.

The use of sound was critical to making our point without saying a word.

This work was reviewed throughout development by our client’s PARC committee, an internal team of medical, legal, and regulatory advisors. They ensured our film made no mention, representation, or suggestion of any specific drug or drug class, per the latest draft guidance from the FDA on disease awareness communications.

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.