An eating disorder such as Anorexia is often categorized by a fear of eating. A person's ego maintains such a tight control over the person - using guilt and shame to police them into not eating anything. My idea was to anthropomorphize this dominant ego in my film and depict the relationship between the lead character and this "friend". This relationship is very toxic  - showing similar signs as an emotionally abusive relationship. The lead is clearly terrified of their friend. The friend is stern and dominating in their body language. And yet the lead is comforted by this friend...

The shoot for this film was guided by the narrative I had created and so it was the first thing I did. For editing purposes, I shot every moment from at least 3 angles, left, right and changed perspective (top/bottom/behind something). 

It was a bit of a challenge to shoot freehand as that made a video a bit shaky; but it was a deliberate decision as the slight shakiness helped to highlight the general tone of anxiety in the film. 

Much of the magic of film was brought around in the editing phase. I tried to play with color masking, slowing clips down and overlaying multiple clips. I had to be smart in the way I cut the film so as to always keep the supporting character as a bit of a mystery (except for one defining moment). 

The last thing to add was sound. I decided to use the beep of cardio-graph as it is associative with that of a heart beat. I wanted to mimic the lead character's heart-beat as she progressed through the sequence of events. Speeding up as she got more anxious and slowing down in other moments. In the end I simply made the sound fade away as if the heart rate had become flat - this was to signify that she lost her current struggle and had become overwhelmed. Although, I let it trail to show that a struggle never really "ends" - rather it ebbs and flows. This added to the idea that the lead's struggle is not linear. 

This is one of my first proper film pieces and was definitely a great learning experience for me. The one thing I learnt was that as an artist, 'oversight' isn't a valid excuse. Although I hadn't intended it to cast my characters in any specific manner, the fact that the victim was white and the 'villain' was a person of color definitely stirred up some debate - while some felt that putting a person of color in a dominating role was a reversal of colonization, other felt I was demonizing. I would like to clarify that I did not intend to portray either of those arguments, however I did learn to be more cognizant of my work is perceived.