We found that we could liken it to a lost child, looking towards our mood board for inspiration Dan had focused on an old photo of his grandparent at the beach as a child. The photo shows the lower halves of his parents holding his hands at the beach. Dan came up with a story idea of the child first playing with his parents and as he lets go of their hands to go play further out on the shore line he loses them, becoming lost in his foggy memories making him curl up int a ball and cry and as he cries the waves come over him like a blanket thats being pulled over by a care taker. This was a nice idea and could be turned into a nice narrative but i was apprehensive as it didn't have any grounding in reality and so couldn't really be classed as a documentary. this meant it didn't work with the brief as it didn't relay any information.
To try and develop our ideas we watched some documetarys and films that went over the concept of alzhiemers and narratives that told stories using diseases and struggles as points to the story. One i showed my group was called out of sight. It is a short animation that follows the story of a blind girl and how she tries to perceive the world. I thought it would of been good to look at because as the girl touches the walls and listens and smells what she can't see, they fade into sight and become clear much like the idea dan had about the foggy memories being difficult to grasp.
While our main focus was to consider the loss and the isolation of the patient we also want to try and convey how the family feels during this time because we don't fully understand how the Alzheimers patient is truly feeling as it can be difficult to understand but to fit this all in a short animation feels difficult and i think could be over crowded.
We went on to watch two movies later on in the week, one that used the story of Alzheimers as its plot point to tell the story, 'Wrinkles' and another, 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' which displays memory loss in a very unique and almost chaotic fashion.
Wrinkles is the story of an old man who has contracted Alzheimers and the film shows his progression of it from the early stages to the point where his mind is almost completely gone. It was at times hard to watch to witness the gradual deterioration of these people but it managed to make the over all film feel light hearted whilst also being able to leave a much harder hitting, emotional impact when needed. The movie also used some ideas that we had considered already such as the beach scene and the fog, so they're commonly used ways to show the concept of Alzheimers within media. The movie was also incredibly accurate in its depiction of the Alzheimers patients and how the care home was run as it was very reminiscent to the Louie Theroux documentary we watched the week prior. A lot of the scenes took place in foggy flash backs as some characters were perpetually trapped in the past within their own minds, these can be frightening concepts but are certainly necessary if we want to portray how the patient possibly views the world.
In the case of Eternal Sunshine we were recommended to watch this by Dan. It is a live action movie that is about a couple who get their memory wiped and it all takes place within the mans mind as he tries to hold on to his girlfriend within his mind. While not Alzheimers it doesn't have a very interesting way of portraying the loss of memories, with his world crumbling around him, pinging away and fading into nothing. These are coupled with some really impressive transition shots such as going through a door to another place and time entirely and the whole movie happens both canonically and yet not which is contradictory but it comes back round to the beginning and if you blink you'll miss it sort of things will happen so it makes good use of subliminal story telling.
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