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.

The product design was crafted to achieve a feeling of heightened anxiety, where the hero’s world feels steeped in realism but grows increasingly overwhelming and askew as her mental state deteriorates.

Disorienting set design was our primary technique for achieving this: pattered curtains and wallpaper, messy bookshelves, a hardware store brimming with odds and ends, and, finally, the hero’s kitchen plastered with newspaper cutouts. All these details reinforce the hero’s emotional state of a mind overflowing with thoughts and losing control.

To further accentuate these deep feelings, props adhered to a rich earth-toned color palette. Oxblood, ochre, moss, sulphur, and berry were all applied to create depth without tipping over into true darkness until the final scene.

By the end of the film, the clutter and color are stripped away completely as our hero fully breaks from reality, lost to her psychosis.

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They ensured our film made no mention, representation, or suggestion of any specific drug or drug class, per the latest draft guidance from the FDA on disease awareness communications.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.