LOW | Type 1 Diabetes | Short Film (2024)

LOW is a short film that documents my experience with type 1 diabetes and the technologies I use to manage it through a combination of live video and stop motion animation.
During the spring semester of my sophomore year of college, I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, a treatable but incurable autoimmune disease that destroys insulin producing cells in the pancreas. The diagnosis turned my whole world upside down. Learning to live with the medical materials and technologies I needed to stay alive was daunting at first, but the continuous, repetitive cycle of care required to manage my blood sugar quickly became a part of my everyday life.
As the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months, I continued to be amazed by the material nature of the disease. It wasn’t long after I was diagnosed that I started to collect the diabetic waste I was cycling through. Although these materials and technologies were designed to be disposed of, I was compelled to hang on to them, to keep them close to me. I became determined to create something out of these materials and the loss they had come to define. These materials had become an extension of myself and my body, an external manifestation of an internal struggle. But their intended purpose of keeping my body alive wasn’t enough for me. I wanted these pieces of myself to mean something to those who couldn’t understand the disease for themselves, to say something about the fragility of life that I could never say without them.
Inch by inch, shot by shot, I documented my collection of diabetic waste, of plastic packaging, paper pull tabs, expired sensors, insulin vials, syringes, dull lancets, used needles, and bloody alcohol prep pads through stop motion animation. In an attempt to capture the physicality of the disease, I paired the animated patterns I created from these materials with live videos of myself testing my blood sugar and changing my insulin pump.
The live videos in the film were shot over the course of three months. They were all confined to my dorm room for the semester, except for the videos in the snow scene, which were shot in the field above my home in Vermont. The graphics in the film were hand drawn and based on the graphics and text featured in the Omnipod and Dexcom apps I use for my insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor respectively.
Making this film was my first attempt at archiving type 1 diabetes, at processing my experience with this life changing disease and the life saving technologies that define it. My life will be bound to the mess of type 1 until I die. But as long as I continue to beep and click, tear and bleed, move and breathe through this disposable cycle of care, I will continue to find moments of quiet within the noise. I will continue to find moments of light within the dark, whether they come from the sun itself or the screens of my diabetic devices.

[@lareaarnett]

I don’t know how you are able to choose images and put them together so that they evoke such strong emotions. Very powerful video.