Amanda Lyon, Executive Producer at BBC Studios Specialist Factual Productions, reveals how a creative partnership brings the worlds of neurodivergent people to screen in BBC Two’s Chris Packham fronted series.
The two new episodes, Inside Our ADHD Minds and Inside Our Dyslexic Minds, are available on iPlayer from 12th May 2025.
In early 2022 I embarked on a series of pitch meetings with graphics companies for the series that became Inside Our Autistic Minds. The brief was the loosest I’d ever given. All I could reveal was the budget and the requirement that we wanted 4 films around 2 mins in duration. Each one would be completely bespoke and would attempt to visualise the interior world of the autistic person at its heart. Their mission; to reveal to their loved ones what was really going on inside their minds.
It’s fair to say that some companies were, entirely understandably, perplexed by this brief. But not graphic designers Hello Charlie. They immediately started throwing around ideas about how we could represent sensory overstimulation on screen using distorted graffiti and overlay text to represent the difference between what someone’s saying and what they’re feeling. I knew we’d found the right people to be our creative partners on the series.
The process of making these visualisations is different each time, but core to their success is the collaboration between our contributors, our directors and the team of graphic designers.
For our latest series, in which we explored other forms of neurodiversity, Suiki, who’s dyslexic, wanted to tell her brothers how difficult she can find it to hold onto ideas and communicate them. BBC Studios Series Producer and Director Joe Myerscough began by talking to Suiki. He then began formulating initial concepts and narrative threads that he presented to the graphics team. A range of ideas were discussed and developed collaboratively into initial story boards which created a backbone for the sequence. As Joe developed the script and the sequence evolved, the priority became to visualise and add life to Suiki’s thoughts, and it was down to the graphic designers to envisage what these ‘thought sprites’ could look like. We shared images of various natural forms with Suiki and together landed on a creature which was part seed pod, part petal, but which floated in the air like a jellyfish in the sea.
The technology used was Cinema HD, with animation on top to create the organic movement that gave the creatures life. 3D camera tracking then placed them in the real-world environment. What was crucial was Suiki’s buy-in and knowing that what we were collectively putting on screen was authentic and right for her. We shared multiple iterations with final sign off happening moments before she stepped into the real woodland to shoot the plates onto which these sprites would be animated. On set, Suiki’s natural ability to interact with the imaginary creatures was the icing on the cake.
All the films require a careful balance of budget against ambition. The polish of the finished product disguises what is frequently a back-to-basics approach. Suiki’s ‘magic mirror’ into her enchanted woodland was a disguised serving hatch in the corner of a Scout hut. While the barrage of intrusive ADHD thoughts that Henry experiences in Inside our ADHD Minds was a bulk hire of plastic balls from a ball pit company. Collectively, we’ve learnt to marshall our ambitions and find creative ways to deliver a look for less.
One of the challenges of this production is how high the stakes are for these visualisations. The programmes build to a climax when contributors show their friends and family the films. The promise is that they’ll reveal something about the workings of their minds that they haven’t been able to articulate previously and, when it’s screened, each film needs to deliver on that huge emotional promise. It needs to be worthy of the vulnerability and honesty of our contributors. In programme terms, it needs to deliver a satisfying conclusion to each episode. For that reason, the days of the reveals are always a little nerve wracking.
For me and my team, one of the joys of working collaboratively with graphic designers on these projects is that they share that burden. They take the responsibility as seriously as we do. In the words of Hello Charlie’s Senior Creative Chaz Golding “this is a project that everybody wants to get right. We want to do it because we’re passionate about the subject matter.”
Looking back now, I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Jon Creamer
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