For my campaign I focused on a specific mental health issue. I choose to focus on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) – a mental health condition where a person has recurring thoughts and repetitive behaviours (often outside of their control).
Personally, I think that OCD can be trivialised and I wanted to show the realities of this illness and emphasise the stress that this illness can cause someone.
Ideally, this advertisement helped to raise awareness and provide information about OCD. I wanted it to encourage people to be more open about discussing this topic and, ideally, remove any stigma about it within conversation. I tried to do this by including a website which has more information about the topic. I think that a point of view video also helped to demonstrate this.
I had the idea to incorporate a lot of fast cuts in my advertisement. This technique can be used to quickly convey information or to imply chaos.
I feel like a combination of repetitive, fast paced cuts helped to imply the point of view and repetitive nature of OCD.
I increased the speed of these cuts throughout as it further created a sense of distress.
For this project we were told to create an advertising campaign focusing on mental health. We were allowed to use either our own photography or found imagery to create both a static and moving advertisement – however I decided to take my own footage for this project. We also needed to show our research and development.
I decided that I wanted to create my advertisement focusing on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as I feel that this illness can be trivialised and there can be a lot of confusion between OCD and perfectionism. In my research I discovered that OCD involves intrusive thoughts that make you perform repetitive actions. I thought this task would be a great opportunity to help provide information about this topic.
In order to convey this I decided to take footage of some of the tasks that people with OCD may carry out. I repeated these in a loop, speeding them up over time in order to convey the repetitive nature of this mental illness and connote the distress that this can cause. The use of close ups will help remove distraction from anything else in the video so that the focus can be on the actions being carried out. I hope that my idea would help raise awareness about this topic and help to start a conversation.
To create consistency I made sure to use a consistent font and colour scheme. In my static advertisement I made sure to align the text and image, adhering to the grid like style of the backdrop. The font that I chose for these advertisements was a bold, sans-serif font. I chose this as it is easy to read and will stand out on an advertisement
I feel like my static and moving advertisements clearly emphasise the repetitive behaviour of OCD and will hopefully provide information and raise awareness about this mental illness.
