Hey! How Are You?

Men­tal health is often treat­ed as a secret, some­thing peo­ple feel they have to hide or be ashamed of. We want­ed to pull these inter­nal strug­gles into pub­lic view. The goal was­n’t to teach lessons, but to break the silence and cre­ate a start­ing point for peo­ple to actu­al­ly talk to one anoth­er.

We devel­oped “Hey! How Are You?” 2022 at Die Graphis­che high school in Vien­na for our diplo­ma project.

To keep the project ground­ed in real­i­ty, we did­n’t want to use a made-up script. Instead, we sat down with peo­ple who live with var­i­ous men­tal health chal­lenges and record­ed near­ly four hours of inter­views about their actu­al expe­ri­ences. You can hear frag­ments of these real voic­es through­out the film. These con­ver­sa­tions pro­vid­ed the raw mate­r­i­al for the char­ac­ters and the way their inter­nal worlds are rep­re­sent­ed.

The project is a six-minute film that fol­lows five dif­fer­ent peo­ple through a sin­gle day—from a morn­ing com­mute on the sub­way to a par­ty at night. Because feel­ings are some­thing you can’t see, we com­bined real-life video with hand-drawn ani­ma­tions.

We used a “raw” style of ani­ma­tion, draw­ing each frame by hand. These visu­al ele­ments are meant to rep­re­sent the inter­nal states described by the peo­ple we inter­viewed, such as feel­ings of over­load, heav­i­ness, or being trapped. By lay­er­ing these draw­ings over the video, we tried to make the inter­nal exter­nal.

Contributors

Writer, direc­tor & edi­tor: Franziska Ebn­er

Cam­era & light­ing: Andreas Matzinger

Sound & music: Elias van Gils

Ani­ma­tions: Astrid Schrödl

Graph­ic design: Karin Holz­mann

Actor: Son­ja Aufre­it­er

Actor: Lau­ra Cam­pos

Actor: Hel­mut Perez

Actor: Alexan­der Smirzitz

Actor: Flo­renti­na Ser­les

Thanks

U!Shine Vien­na

Wiener Lin­ien