"BEER IS THE GUN - REFRAME: The Intentional Degradation of a Memory"

is a film that I made for my degree show in 2017.

I tell the story of my Post traumatic Stress Disorder and how I am trying to overcome it. Often in talking therapies such as NLP, CBT, etc. you are urged to think of a trauma and then to drain all of the colour from it, shrink it, and run it backwards. I began to think about how I could start to reframe my own childhood trauma by employing these techniques. I wanted to take this even further so I hired three different groups of actors to help me to begin to deconstruct my memory in a way that I had no control over. I gave each group the same 4 props and then less and less information about my trauma. I invited them to tell their own stories with the props from the information that I provided and then make a film and return it to me. Every time that the story was retold by different groups of actors it became further and further from the truth, my truth. At the end I still found myself surrounded by violent imagery and even though the stories that they told were not mine, the involvement of such props as the gun meant that there was always a violent element to the story.  I decided to go in and edit the story, visually adding in the four steps and then I overlaid the film with found footage from my child and the year the incident occurred.