In Brazil, medicines sold under medical prescription cannot be advertised directly to the consumer, only to the medical class. Campaigns can raise awareness to a disease and it’s symptoms and invite the public to talk to a doctor to find out about the possibilities of treatment. To catch the medical classe's attention, we focused on creating a film that could both explain the symptoms and generate a connection with the patients.
THE FILM
“Beautiful Dreamer” is the story of a young woman with big plans for the future. She is a romantic person, always scribbling down her goals, from starting her own business to visiting Indonesia. Her wall rapidly fills up with Post-It notes. In between notes, she starts to experience symptoms like a mild dizziness and tingling feet. Nothing that worries her. But when she grabs a hot plate straight from the oven and doesn’t feel any pain in her burnt hand, she decides to pay a visit to a doctor. As she receives a FAP diagnosis from the doctor, she feels like her whole world comes tumbling down, as she realizes she might not live to fulfill her dreams. But after knowing that there are treatments to prevent the disease from advancing, hope is restored and she gets on with life to pursue her dreams.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
The film has 3 key dramatic moments: a life full of dreams, dreams being crashed by the diagnosis and the realisation that you can continue dreaming. The cinematography follows the emotional progression of the character. To build intimacy, frame is always close to the actress, never too wide, shooting it entirely handheld and with the camera in movement. To navigate towards the most dramatic moment, we went from exterior to interior, from day to night, going darker as the story progresses. At the diagnosis moment we wanted to break the fast pace of her dreams by holding the camera more still as she receives the bad news, with shallow depth of field and a colder colour palette. For the final scene, a light transition from the darkness of her mind to the brightness of her future, the same way as the begging of the film: more energetic, brighter and warmer.
MUSIC
The song chose for the film was “Beautiful Dreamer”, written by Stephen Foster and published in 1846. The lyric matches perfectly with the film, as it was written for a woman as a call to show her all the beautiful things that are still out there in the world waiting for her. The music was recorded preserving it’s original repetitious but lovely melody and the calm sentimentality that represents the character of the film. As the story develops to a darker place, the music suffers some discomforting and distorted sounds as we see her symptoms starting to show. The singer’s voice becomes muffled when she receives the terrible news from the doctor as an attempt to make the audience feels a bit of what she’s going through. We hear the song becoming cheerful again when the character finds out she can be treated and go after her dreams.
