Research - Mad women

As we have decided to use a character who has a mental illness, we needed to find out what we were creating. By creating this character we knew we would have to make it as realistic as possible. So by researching mental health issues and patients it meant we could give advice to our actress/group member on how to play the role effectively. Through research I found out there was many differet types of mental disorders/illesses. Due to use having a vague storyline for our trailer, we wanted to show the character having two sides to her.

I found out about the Bi-polar disorder and how it causes mood swings. In one of our shots it shows the character mothering a teddy bear, and in the next shot it shows her rocking dramatically so therefore this is slightly showing two sides of the characters personality. Other symptoms include depression so with this we wanted to show this in our shots.
The stereotypical idea of a 'Crazy Woman' would be someone who acts mad and does not have control over their behaviour. As our trailer only had one character it was harder for us to show what we were trying to create and therefore had to make it as obvious as possible that there was something not quite right with our character. We wanted to tease the audience but we also wanted them to have an idea wht was going on as we want to impress the audience so they would want to watch the full length movie of our trailer.

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/women-and-bipolar-disorder/ This link gives information about the bi-polar disorder which was useful for us and inspired us by giving us new ideas on the types of footage we would use in our shots and what would take place.

Schizophrenia is also another illness I researched to find out the symptoms and how this illness can effect people. As my role of researcher I thought that it would be good for my group if I was able to give advice on how to get into the role. My research then meant that I had a clear understanding of the character we was trying to portray and therefore could give tips on actions we would use in the shots. Being a previous drama student meant that I had skills that I could pass on to the actress and advice that I could give to make the acting seem as real as possible. By conducting this research It would help to portray the character that we are creating for our trailer.