Dreamscape
Non-linear Community
What is community, and how do we experience it? This is a question that I had to answer through the process of Non-linear Community project. I was prompted to think about my vision of community, and how I could represent it through a non-linear narrative. I began by writing about what community means to me, and how I fit into this space.
I started thinking about how my idea of community is dictated by the people I feel comfortable with and the places I make memories in. Community can be built and found, and they can change with time. To me, communities are specific to the people in them. I thought about the communities I am a part of, and which people and places I filter into which community. From here, I landed on this idea of community in my dreams. Though this is a community that exists only in my subconscious, it is still a space where I interact with certain people. Those that I interact with in my dreams are different from the people I interact with in reality (for example, the groupings are different or the activities I do with them are not plausible). All of the people in my dream community are taken out of context of my conscious realities, and re-jumbled to create this new community.
To me, community is defined in three parts: people, places, and content. This distinction is what separates one community from the other. So, from this structure, I developed the three videos that I would create. Each video would focus on one of the parts of community, the first being landscape, the second is content (type), and the third is figures.
I had thought about combining all of these aspects to create one conglomerate dreamscape, but when I thought more about the structure of my dreams, this triptych began to make more sense. My dreams are either very visual or very aural; it’s hard to remember the audio and dialogue in some dreams, but the ones where I do, I see less of the scenery. I was interested in seeing how this would translate to time based media.
I began brainstorming what elements would go into each video, and what possible visuals could be. I gravitated toward the idea of warping and blurring out figures to represent how I remember my dreams.
Gathering Content
To begin gathering content, I went through my notes app to reread my recorded dreams. As I was going through my notes, I found this quote, and while it doesn’t directly relate to the subject of dreams, I found it interesting. This triptych structure of life returns:
“A person lives three lives: The first ends with the loss of naïvete, the second ends with the loss of innocence, and the third with the loss of life itself.”
I have 113 dreams recorded, so naturally I had a lot to work with. I went through them all and picked out the ones that I had the most vivid recollection of, and chose those ones as the base for my visuals.
From here, I looked through my family’s archive of photos from the last few decades as visuals. Because dreams are so tied to memory, collection and the past I chose to use these old film photos to replicate this faded quality. I then took these images into Adobe After Effects and played around with some presets. I had never worked with the mesh warp tool or any of the warping masks, so I took this opportunity to learn something new. I got comfortable with the tools so by the end of this exercise I was ready to jump into my first cuts of the videos.
Type Bath
For the typography portion of the project, I wanted to warp type. Since in the dreams that are mostly audio I don’t see many visuals, I wanted to keep this concept in my video, and boil it down to only type. My idea was to cut the quotes out of vinyl, install them in my bathtub, fill it with water, and record the type interacting with the water. The warping from the waves and the bubbles mirrors a dreamlike quality, and would look more organic than digital warping. The video would include fragments of words and sentences, allowing the viewer to catch glimpses of nonsensical words, just like how I experience my dreams. I went through my notes and found a bunch of bizarre things that people said in my dreams, and out of context they make even less sense. Here are the ones I chose:
A woman her age should not be left alone in a motel.
Where even is Christmas anyways? Above Belize?
I have a lot of concrete and a hot tub.
Put it in the jalapeño that expels heat.
Who is that tiny orange lady? I’m a tiny woman, but I’m French!
I was watching your head slowly eclipse the rock.
It’s not just the clams, but the clambockers.
I’ll have the leftovers to save the planet.
There is a band of dead people playing the standing piano.
Did you have to take my favorite cereal?
How much will you pay me if I get leaves for my noise?
I put these quotes into Illustrator and made them into vinyl. This was my first time using the vinyl machine, and it went surprisingly smoothly. I really enjoyed the process and only had a few minor hiccups (I didn’t know I needed to use transfer paper so I tried to just freehand the installation, which absolutely did not work).
Once we got the transfer paper (and figured out that we needed to wipe the tub down with alcohol wipes in order for the vinyl to stick) it was smooth sailing. My roommate and I installed the quotes on the bathtub*, and really had a blast doing this. We took so many pictures and videos, and were entertained for 2 hours. It was so fun to experiment with flash and moving the water with our hands and the spout. Each variable produced so many different outcomes — possibilities were endless. Two photos of the same word, even one second apart, would look so different just because of the movement of the water. It was so interesting to see how the camera caught what our eyes couldn’t and captured the blur and warp of the type. I could already see the video coming together.
With the footage from this shoot, I created a running Premiere Pro file just to house all the videos in one place. I showed this to James, and got a lot of really good feedback. He sent me some tutorials for 8D sound, which could really elevate the dream state in this project. We also talked about some movie references, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that might be good to watch for inspiration on how to visually represent my concept.
Visuals
Jumping off of the warping that I did in my experiment video, I brought more imagery and footage into After Effects. I knew that I didn’t want to exclusively have still pictures in the landscape and people videos because I thought that would feel too static, and wouldn’t reflect the dynamism of my dreams. In my Editorial Design class, I created a multi-format book about my dreams. The publication included images, text and cutouts, so I took videos of the book to overlay onto the stills to create more movement.
Once I had this footage, I brought it into After Effects along with the old family photos. I had a lot of fun overlaying the stills and the videos, and trying out different warping techniques. For the most part, I primarily used the blur, mesh warp, and blending mode tools to achieve the effects in the videos. The process was super long and definitely got difficult at times, but I learned a lot about sequencing and editing through the process.
For the typography-based video, I only used the videos from the water bath, along with a few clips that I recorded of my eyes to tie it back to a dream state. I used blending modes and contrast effects to create this video. By overlapping my face, typography and the bubbles, I hoped to create a flickering glimpse into my dreams. Some words or phrased flash on screen for a split second, making them hard to grasp or remember. Others stay on screen for a bit longer, allowing the viewer to read and hear them. No matter the duration of the type, there is always a wobble or distortion that entrances the viewer into a difference space and makes them forget that they are looking at vinyl underwater in a tub.
Audio
In my first critique, we decided that the violent gushing of the water worked less than the light splashing, so I needed to keep this in mind when mixing. We also talked about 8D audio, which entails changing whether the audio comes through the left or right channels to give the effect of a 3D sound. I used James’ super fancy (and slightly creepy looking, it had extremely realistic silicon ears) microphone to record the sound of the water so I could easily split the channels. In addition to the water sounds, I also recorded my voice reading some snippets of the dreams (including the words I installed in the tub) and videos I had taken over the past year. I layered the recordings with the water to give the feeling of a muffled and distorted space. Just like the visuals, the audio is ambient and layered. You have to concentrate to hear something that stands out, and every once in a while a bizarre phrase floats into range. And just like my dream journal, the more time you revisit the documentation of the dream, the more details you notice and remember. These videos are meant to be viewed multiple times to really catch all of the strange moments sprinkled throughout. As I was editing I recorded more water sounds and voiceovers, depending on the flow of the video. Most of my process for this bit was reactionary to the video.
The audio piece was a huge learning curve for me. I had never recorded my own audio, or edited the channels of any audio. I watched a lot of tutorials and made a lot of phone calls to my experienced friends. After a lot of trial and error, I was able to isolate, overlap and muffle the audio in a way that reflected the dreaminess of the visuals.
Reflection
Throughout the course of this project, I really learned a lot about motion graphics. I feel the most proud of this project from this semester, and explored a concept that I had been curious about for a long time. I was able to experiment with video and type treatment, and played around with different effects in two programs. This was the first video that I fully created from start to finish, including audio, video and images. I’m extremely proud of how it came out, and look forward to creating more videos like this in the future.
Please enjoy the triptych Dreamscape. This is only scratching the surface of my dreamworld.
*yes, the vinyl is still in my shower, and no it hasn’t gone down the drain yet.
