By Fraser Lawson

Content warning 

Please note, this is a description of one person’s experience with bipolar, and may contain imagery that some find upsetting. TW: graphic language and imagery relating to suicide including methods, post-partum mental illness, and depictions of medical treatments and procedures including ECT, caesarean section and hospitalisation.

Please do not watch it if you are feeling unwell.

If you do find it triggering, please do reach out for support. 

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When I was 19 I was diagnosed with manic depression, the term used for bipolar back in the mid-80s. Not much was known about this debilitating illness other than it could cause long periods of deep depression and bursts of over-energised mania.

Stigma around mental health was running high. I remember thinking this is something I can’t share with any of my friends or work colleagues, which made my illness feel even more shameful.

Why did you make Swing?

I have always wanted to share my day-to-day experience of living with bipolar and its effect on me and the people around me. It has had a profound impact on my life, and I believe the more first-hand knowledge out there the better.

But I have always approached documentaries and films relating to mental illness with apprehension and often just don’t engage with it. I find them upsetting and tend to over empathise with them. Not the best way to learn.

I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, which also explained elements of my behaviour. I needed to find a different way to tell my story.

what do you hope to achieve with it?

I hope Swing reaches audiences of different generations, through social media and other platforms, in a way that can be hard hitting and unsettling but enlightening.

By taking my personal story and treating it irreverently it hopefully makes it less intense and more watchable.

How did you make the film?

I have a background in the television advertising industry where I was a producer for 20 years. I have worked with fantastic people who have creative, original approaches to filmmaking which I’ve been able to draw on.

To make Swing, I first wrote a breakdown of the key points in my life which we then cut down and turned into a script. We recorded the voiceover and used that as a basis for the images.

We shot on an iPhone to keep things cheap and simple, and we used an array of techniques to mimic the symptoms of bipolar – for example, stop frame animation for mania and slow motion for depression.

why did you use Action Man figures?

To be honest, it was partly a practical decision. My original idea was for an animated film but that’s expensive! But Action Man and Barbie were a good choice to tell the story because they’re familiar figures and it gave the subject matter, while still powerful, a touch of humour which we hoped made it easier to digest.

Action Man was one of my childhood toys, but he also signifies machismo which felt like a good contrast with me/my character being very emotionally vulnerable.

What do you want to do next?

I’d like to make something longer and to keep raising awareness and knowledge.