How my first anxiety video changed
Written on 7th May 2021 by Alex Lowery
When I was 19, I made a short video about my day-to-day struggles with anxiety. Believe it or not: the video changed quite a bit from my original plan for it. I was originally planning to cover a lot more aspects of anxiety. I was planning to talk about how I got anxious when I made mistakes and felt very self-conscious about my autism coming out in public. I even had a sketch planned to help illustrate this anxiety. You can even see a reference to this in the final cut when I mention how I try to have positive thoughts when I make mistakes. There was more context to that part in the script.
Needless to say, the film was originally going to be longer than it ended up being. I made some scenes for the film and edited them together with a voice-over and a piece of music which I felt fit perfectly. I came to find that the timing between the music and the film was so unbelievably perfect that it seemed like a shame to add more footage to it. If you watch it, you’ll know what I mean. The soundtrack ends the exact second that the film does. The timing could not be better! The film felt finished even though I had more stuff planned and even though I felt there were more important things to say.
I showed it to my mum and she also felt the film didn’t really need to be longer. So that’s how the film ended up being the length it did. Overall I was happy with how the film turned out but to this day I do wish I had prioritized more. I don’t think the way I mentioned my stress over DVDs being out of order was a very important thing to mention. I feel there were other things to talk about which are way more important and give me much more severe anxiety than lack of sequence does. Another thing is, when I look at the picture quality now it’s pretty bad! I don’t think I had a good camera to use at that time but it still feels awkward to watch now. However, thankfully I did make up for these mistakes with this when I made my second anxiety film at age 25. In the second one, the picture quality was really good and I did include some of the examples I missed the first time around. You can view the second one here.
Please watch my first anxiety video in the link below. Please do comment letting me know your thoughts on the film.
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