WHAT AUTISM FEELS LIKE: YOUNG PEOPLE'S STORIES

This film is the fourth in a series of videos commissioned by YouTube and Best For You – a partnership between CW+ and three NHS trusts. It follows the very successful, award-winning first film on eating disorders, which can be viewed here. The films are being created to help make it easier for young people to access high-quality, safe, health information.

The film was created entirely from interviews with autistic young people and voiced by autistic actors. It highlights the challenges autistic young people can face, while celebrating the resilience, creativity, and strengths that help them navigate and thrive in a world that is not always designed with them in mind.

We worked with the same naïve hand drawn style and characters that we established in the earlier films. Having close connections to people with autism made the process of creating this film particularly personal. Everyone experiences diversity differently so there was still a lot to learn. The cast of simple but engaging animated characters were a real asset in enabling us to communicate situations and behaviours our interviewees found helpful or challenging. This film is a very useful tool to help those with autism learn from each other and for those who don’t have autism to better understand what life is like for people that do. We all benefit from better understanding how each other's brains work. Simple small changes can make a big difference to the lives of others but we are often not aware of the impact of our actions on those who’s brains work differently to ours.

The writer was Andrew Lane Fox and the film was produced by Sarah Baker of BB Productions. Sound design by Coda Post Production.