This place has been in need of an update for some time. As my Calendar shows, I have been quite busy with responsibilities for the other two classes I am taking (Beginning Photography and Lighting for Film and Video), as well as my employment. What follows is a summary of my activities during Week 03.

I read through my 60+ page dream journal of the last 3 years, and selected 12 dreams that might be suitable for use in this project, based on the following criteria:

1). Dreams that have a quality of being inspired by something outside of normal day to day experienced – ones that are removed from reality experience to a compelling degree – seemingly an illogical and metaphorical product of the subconscious rather than a direct product of the day’s experiences.

2). They have to be dreams that I remember specific imagery from, because I will be creating the images from memory of the images, not reinterpretation of the text that I wrote after having the dream.

3). Dreams which are less narrative (containing voices and conversation) and more visual experience dreams. Ones that satisfy the questions of ‘what dreams are fitting for conversion into an animation that people will watch?’

I then numbered them 1 through 12 and used a truly random process (an online random number generator that uses atmospheric noise as a seed source) to select 3 of them. I was left with dreams 5, 8, and 12. That link is to a doc file containing the original full text of the dreams as I wrote them down when I woke up.

This last week I have been considering the challenge of how to adapt these dreams of disparate subject matter and thematic content into a coherent and compelling work of animation. Each of the dreams feature quite a lot of content. Some of the content is relatively uninteresting in terms of possessing a deeper meaning that might be probed. However each dream has certain sections or images or situations that are particularly poignant (these highlighted in yellow in the doc file). My thought is that perhaps if these particular sections were interrogated in detail, they could convey a sort of metaphoric and surreal exercise of self-representation through dream imagery (All of the dreams that were selected feature me as a 1st person presence).

I am still very uncertain about the approach that I am taking to translating these dreams into a visual experience. In my dreams my sense of self is fluid and changes often. Sometimes I will be a character experiencing the dream from a 1st person perspective – that is, seeing events unfold with my own eyes. At other times (and often in the same dream) this will shift, and I will be looking at myself as an exterior character in the dream. The question is, how does one convey this within the much more “hard” medium of audio-visual construction of moving images? Would one attempt to simulate a 1st person experience within the piece itself, or attempt to show the character as 1st person, and thus be unfaithful to the experience of the dream? Should one be wary of confusing switches between experiential perspective, or not worry about how illogical occurrences are, and be faithful to the memory of the experience of the dream?

With these concerns voiced, here is a rough first attempt at a translation from dream-recollection into a sort of visual treatment for the sequence of events that might occur in the audiovisual translation of the dreams: (more…)

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Form:
This project will take the form of an experimental animation, using techniques such as compositing of live-action footage, rotoscoping mattes for transparency, image-processing with digital effects, hand-drawn images used as backgrounds, and 3D digital animation. Utilizing a favorite technique of the Surrealists, I will delve into my dreams as a source of visual inspiration. Having kept a dream journal for many years, I will search through it, and find particularly bizarre, vivid, poignant, or otherwise stimulating examples. These examples will then be used to create short sequences which somehow approach a representation of my recollection of the dream imagery. These sequences will be montaged together in a way that provide a sense of cohesion. The sound design will be primarily ambient and textural, to provide a mood-generating and relatively consistent structure within which to experience the images. The result will be a somewhat bizarre and abstract string of images and sounds, with concrete and recognizable objects and forms, but without conventional logical narrative structure. Ideally the audiovisual result will be experienced like a dream by the viewer, bringing to mind a similar sense of intrigue and mystery, and meaning hidden just under the surface.

As an additional layer providing context and meaning, there will be a semantic vocal track containing a somewhat poetic, abstract, and autobiographical reflection on the nature and personal relevance of dreams in everyday life.

Process:
The entire piece will likely be quite short, probably in the range of 5-7 minutes, due to the exceedingly time-intensive processes involved in the creation of the images. Due to the nature of the content, the final result is not exactly clear in my head. I think it will be valuable to employ a technique of creation that embraces an amorphous process, in the sense of allowing the project to shift and change in its form, until it becomes solidified at the end. However, even something amorphous, if it is to become solidified into something definite at a later point in time, must have some sort of constraint or structure to start from. To bring this about, as a starting step, I will choose the distinct dreams I will be working with, and lay out an order for them in a way that encourages horizontal association between the sequences, and seems to make sense structurally. Then I will create storyboards and pre-visualization materials for each of the dreams, and develop visual ideas about innovative ways to combine them. From there, I will start animating and assembling the scenes, and creating sound design. The ‘voiceover’ will be the last thing that I complete, and will be written to encourage vertical sound-image montage, and a sense of cogency with the images.

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This week has been insanely busy, it seems. Of course the first day of the first week of school, I get extremely sick. Instead of tottering home to my bed and falling unconscious for a number of days as I likely should have, I tottered about doing the work that I was supposed to do. On Sunday and Monday (09 24-25), I worked like a rabid dog in the music technology labs, soldering and rewiring the studios for 5.1 surround. Then I worked on Tuesday (09-26) at the front desk to train new people. Then I went home and collapsed, and then woke up on Wed. Morning in order to try to put the finishing touches on my contract, for meeting with Sally Cloninger at 11am that morning.

Now it is Tuesday of Week 02, and having basically done nothing and recovered the previous Thursday and Friday, I feel quite a bit behind. I should have had the treatment for the project I’m going to be working on this quarter done a few days ago. This weekend instead of doing that, I distracted myself by learning some new software technology by going through  a bunch of tutorials on how to work with Nuke and more advanced features of Maya. Yesterday instead of doing that I went to Seattle with Dave Cramton and operated camera for documentation of a seminar on Search Engine Optimization. Today I slept in because I had to leave for Seattle at 5am, and I missed class for Beginning Photography last night because of that, and haven’t done 3 chapters of reading that I was supposed to. Right now I have to run in order to help Dave teach a lighting workshop for Mediaworks.

So yes, things are beginning to be busy as usual. I will probably be up most of the night tonight finishing work on the treatment, and doing that reading for Photo. The treatment will be done first, and will be posted here when I finish with it.

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