First, a progress report.
I’m roughly 10% of the way through the script + storyboard phase. This is what I like to call good progress! My method of using ‘Final Draft GO’ and a dirt-cheap storyboard app simply called ‘Storyboard’ has been working a treat, making the most of my iPad’s split view function.
Some scenes require me to write the script first then figure out the panel layout in the storyboard. Other scenes, typically those with no dialogue, benefit from a storyboard-first approach to visually map it out before vaguely describing those illustrations in the script.
Along with my little foldable keyboard, I’ve been able to chip away at this no matter where I am. In a car, on the bus, lying in bed, at my local takeaway joint… I’m essentially microdosing this stage of the production.
Enough back-patting. What’s this film about?
It’s about a girl named Delilah. Her dad runs a 2nd hand store, which they also live in. The narrative moves through four distinct moments in her childhood and adolescence. She also has a strange thing going on inside her brain. A thing she can’t explain. A thing that you’d probably call obsessive compulsive disorder, and a thing I’ve always had to deal with.
I actively don’t like telling people I have OCD. The term’s been mischaracterised to death. Even now, just writing this, I fear some might believe it to mean Liam’s got a quirky sense of neatness or Liam must have a cute bit of germophobia. This shit ain’t quirky or cute. At best, it’s an annoyance. At worst, it’s a psychological plague.
For the longest time, I convinced myself that I had the O and the C but rarely the D. I wasn’t one of those people locked into a single ritual for hours or who completely avoided social situations for months on end because of an intrusive thought. People couldn’t see my obsessions and compulsions, so how could it possibly affect my everyday living?
Then came the term ‘masking’. And suddenly, a lot of things made sense. My inhibitions, my shame, my insecurities, my self-hatred, my drive to study psychology in university… all inflated by this thing in my head.
This film’s about a girl that – and I must be clear on this – is not a reflection of me or my life, but someone I can relate to on a deep level. Who went through something very similar. She doesn’t know what this thing is, but she knows it’s strange, and she thinks she can’t tell anyone about it because it’s so strange and because she’ll be judged for it.
And the thing surrounds her, despite her best attempts to mask it and live a normal life. This is one of the big reasons I wanted to pursue the moving panels formats, to have the obsessive thoughts and compulsive feelings take up the empty spaces and make her feel small.
Because, at my worst, that’s how this thing made me feel. Young. Small. Clueless. Hopeless. Worthless.
That all sounds dark and heavy but I swear to you it’ll end up being a lot gentler in tone (think Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro or Wim Wender’s Perfect Days). My aim is to contrast Delilah’s gentle physical world with her scratchy mental world. Hopefully, by visualising her struggles like this, it can do a little bit to scrub out the mischaracterisation of OCD.
And while I’m hyper-aware of what the OCD struggle feels like, I also know what helped. Not fixed, but helped, and that’s what I’m most excited to express with this film.