Category: Interactive Film
Advertiser: TIME TO CHANGE
Product/Service: MENTAL HEALTH DISCRIMINATION AWARENESS
Agency: DARE
Production Company: BLINK PRODUCTIONS, London, UNITED KINGDOM
Date of First Appearance: Mar 21 2011
Chief Creative Officer: Danny Brooke-Taylor
Executive Creative Director: Danny Brooke-Taylor
Creative Director: Danny Brooke-Taylor
Copywriter: Matt Lever
Art Director: Helen Board
Agency Producer: Sophie Jones
Account Supervisor: David Mannall
Advertiser's Supervisor: David Mannall
Producer: Georgina Filmore
Director: Tom Tagholm
Editor: Tim Hary
Sound Design/Arrangement: Parv Thind @ Wave Studios
Post Production: The Mill
Cameraman: Luke Scott
Account Manager: Natalie Tobin
Planner: Ben Armistead
Director Of Photography: Luke Scott
Editing Company: Stitch
English Description
Time to Change are funded by Britain’s National Lottery and the charity Comic Relief. Their aim is to end mental health discrimination.
Our campaign centres around the unspoken prejudices people have about mental health.
If somebody we know is off work with a broken leg, we ask them how they’re feeling upon their return. If they’re off with a mental illness, however, there’s a real tendency to say absolutely nothing, for fear of upsetting them or (more truthfully) them “losing it” and causing a scene.
Our interactive video confronts these unspoken prejudices head-on, allowing the viewer to choose the reactions of the guy with a mental-illness. The abnormal scenarios that they choose simply serve to heighten the prejudices that they have.
How it works:
The film opens on an office worker, wondering whether he should ask a colleague who's been off with a mental illness how he’s feeling? He asks him how he’s feeling and then the action stops.
Our viewer is given three options. Two are ridiculous, fantastical ways that the mental-illness-sufferer might react (from turning to a pile of sand to shaming our guy infront of the whole office through the medium of song) and one simply offers the viewer to see an “absolutely fine” reaction. Obviously the majority of viewers pick the fantastical reactions. This then plays out before returning to the options page where the viewer is asked to pick another reaction.
After a number of fantastical reactions have unfolded, the film always resolves to the “absolutely fine” reaction: where our guy reacts perfectly normally and is grateful to our guy for asking him.
The film ends with the endline "Don't be afraid to talk about mental health”, before providing the viewer with a link to the Facebook site.