Diabulimia

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WebMD approached us to collaborate on a short film about Diabulimia, a media-coined term that refers to an eating disorder in which a person with diabetes, typically type I diabetes, purposefully restricts insulin in order to lose weight. These personal stories are always so humbling to hear, and it's an honor to have the opportunity to help share these stories with the world.

Client: WebMD
Director: Courtney Dixon
Creative Post by Coat of Arms
Creative Directors: Clara Lehmann and Jonathan Lacocque
Design Director & Animation: Ryan Butterworth
Sound Design & Mix: Jerry Walterick
Music: Artlist.io

Design

With water being a central theme in the film, the design had to reinforce that. Early designs used a more graphical approach, using large type and wave patterns.

Throughout the film, we used diabetic instruments to help tell the story.

Ultimately, we landed on a clean type-driven approach, using blue bars to tie into the water theme.

Behind the Scenes

In addition to water effects, we also handled a few invisible effects shots.

To help illustrate the path of Erin's struggle and recovery, we came up with the idea of showing photos submerged under water. The greater the struggle, the deeper the photo was submerged. We created a simple graph to use a guide for the amount of effects applied to an image.

Editorial

We had a lot of fun in post on this film, playing with various techniques; from rotating the frame, to using jump-cuts, speed-ramps and other editing tricks to disorient the viewer slightly. The hope was to mirror Erin's journey visually as the film progressed.

Near the end of the film, we had two possible intros. This first one was a little more abstract:

This alternate option (and ultimately what we used) starts with Erin's mom telling us that Erin died:

In case you're interested, here is an early rough cut of the film. It is roughly 21 minutes long, with the final coming in at 16 minutes, 45 seconds. This is without final color, sound, or graphics: