A Unique Vision of Dreams
“3 Dreams of Black” is an interactive music video/film directed by Chis Milk for the song “Black” by Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppi and Norah Jones. The video is an experience that is unlike any other especially for the time it was made, in 2011. The music video takes you on a journey through three dream worlds, each one with its own unique style and look. These Dream worlds are brought to life through a combination of excellent 2D drawings and animations. While also blending together a 3d interactive experience that is incredibly well done and works very well. Throughout various points in these dream worlds, you can grab your mouse and guide the protagonist’s point of view through the experience. This allows the viewer to become the protagonist in the story and see the world as if they were the ones exploring it for real. The whole project was helped put together by Google and you can tell by the quality of the production. Along with the video there is another interactive experience that allows you to build your own dream world. As well as viewing other peoples. “3 Dreams of Black” drops you at the center of your most colorful and happy dreams. This film succeeds in everything its trying to accomplish and produce a piece of artistry that was truly ahead of its time. It was a heavy contributed to the new wave world of immersive entertainment that is hitting hard and harder each year.
“3 Dreams of Black” is centered around its POV angel that the view is put in control of. Its goal is to really make the viewer feel like they are traveling through their own dream. The song “Black” that plays in the background is also meant to feel like a dream. The melody is a trippy vibe and the song alone makes you feel like you are floating on a cloud. You feel a great sense of freedom and everything else going on in the world feels blocked out. This is a huge victory for the artist that produced this piece. Other videos have tried to do this and failed and their immersive experience fails because of it. 3 Dreams puts you on this journey always your mind to be ripped from reality. The POV angle start off live action as you are driving and camping in a post apocalyptic world. It feels real but you can tell that something is a little off. Then you dive into the next dreamland only its animation now, the song pics up and the dream feels more and more like a dream. Through each dream world you dive deeper into the animation and unrealistic landscape, while also developing more and more control of the dream world. I believe Milk did this on purpose, to make the viewer feel they were diving deep and deeper into a sleep. The viewer becomes more in control of the dream and the vividness and the detail of the dream as they would if they were actually falling deeper in to an actual dream. The POV letting you be able to shift angles and view points really allows each viewers dream to feel unique to them. Making the video unique for each viewer is an important element of any film of music video. The difference with this film is that instead of the viewer watching it or listening to it in a different mind set or in a different mood, they can actually make each experience different because of the what they view. they can look at different areas of the world during different times in the song they can be looking up down, side to side, It doesn’t matter. There is no certain way to watch, which is exactly what the artists wanted.
In the last dream, the most vast and dream like world, as your mouse crosses the screen and the camera angle flies around. This animated desert filled with all shorts of unworldly things, a group of birds are flying in front and behind where every your mouse points. It makes the viewer feel like they are a bird flying with a flock, drifting through the wind. This goes along with my other point I made before about the tone and melody of the song that this video is based around. When your listening to it, it really gives you the sensation of flight but not a fast flight like on a jet. Rather an easy soar through the wind. Adding birds to the animation allowed for the flight sequence in the last dream to feel more real and reinforced the atmosphere of the song. This technique is used in other dreams also. In the second world your mouse vision guider can be use to look up the sides of building, as you soar through the streets of an animated city. When you look up the sides the areas where you look up begin to get coved with wildlife. Trees, animals and grass growing up and down the sides of the buildings. These 2 concepts reflect the over arching theme in this video’s dream worlds and song, this idea of freedom. Freedom to fly like a bird in an endless beautiful animated world or the freedom to run like a buffalo, which we see in another sequence in the video. Also to break free of the constrains of the city world and grow freely like nature. The videos animation reflects and is mirroring lyrics from the song, which talk about looking up in the sky and wanting to be free. With any other video you could get this message but what separates this experience is that you don’t just get to watch it or closer your eyes and envision what it would be like, you get to be the bird, you get to be free. This is why artist love this technology so much because they can truly plant you in their heads and what they want you to feel when you experience their work.
A portion of the website, that while it isn’t a part of the core narrative of the video, but I believe is still very important and can be developed into something great is the ability to create ones own narrative pieces. At the end of the video the site takes you to a page that has links to other parts of the site. One allows you to go back into the end of the video and fly around as a bird with the chorus on repeat. Two of the other ones allow you to make objects to put in the birds endless world and look at other peoples. I reference this before about how the artists really wanted this to feel like a unique experience for each viewer that came through the world, this is another step in that direction, making your own creations. This ability also allows you to look into the minds of other people as they are hearing the song. What are they picturing in their head as they are flying through the desert as a bird listening to this beautiful melody.
When you take this website and put it all together what you get is a great look at the evolution of video technology what has happened over the last 20 years. Music before even video was invented was meant to be an immersive experience. Composers wanted you to get lost in their music. They did that all through sound and let the viewer visualize the world. Then video was created and slowly it did the same thing in a visual way. Now with technology like we see with “ 3 Dreams of Black” artist can give you the whole package in one and still allow you to be apart of the experience. The view is not just along for the ride, they are a part of the ride. Making each experience different from the next. This video was made back in 2011 as I said earlier, it was one of the first to do this and do it well. Since then this idea of an immersive interactive experience is at the center of entertainment and artist. Thing like VR and Augmented reality are being used for movies and Music videos to do exactly what this video succeed at years ago. The only differences is that now the technology is improved resulting in the artist to enhance ever element of the experience. “3 Dreams of Black” is an experience that even though it came out only 7 years ago, was still ahead of its time. It laid the ground work with many other sides for a shift in how consume and immerse ourself in the digital and audio world.
-To look deeper into how this was created take a look at this video documenting its production
-Here is a link to the website where you can experience it all for yourself.
