This semester, I have explored ways to best convey the surreal, absurd and nightmarish qualities of dreams through film, focussing largely on space, lighting and sound. By surreal qualities, I essentially mean the most dreamlike aspects of dreams that go against any reality-based logic, yet are ultimately accepted by the dreamer. Therefore, my aim was to take these surreal qualities, and frame it in a way that the audience might accept the strange elements, just as the dreamer does. The absurd qualities very much overlap with the surreal, as they too are things that make little sense in reality. However, in terms of my own distinction between the two, the absurd qualities tended to seem more ridiculous, and often humorous. Finally, the nightmarish qualities are the scary and unsettling aspects of dreams. This also overlaps with the surreal elements, as the strange and unfamiliar is in itself often unsettling, but like absurdity for me was a focus on humour, the nightmarish was a focus on the scary side to dreams. Despite these very similar and overlapping definitions, the challenge of my work was to achieve convey these qualities within the same piece, often simultaneously.

 

The first thing I did was select a dream that I had earlier this year, and used it as the basis for my exploration. I felt that this dream contained elements of all of the three qualities that I had planned to work with, with a particular emphasis on absurd. When it came to the practical stage of the project, how to convey these qualities through film became the central focus. I found that three elements seemed to be the most useful in this: space, lighting and sound. With space, I focused on the way in which locations are often very vague in dreams and often merging and switching around. In order to convey this, I experimented with simple cuts between two different locations, as well as making transitions that saw a character go from one location to another with one step cut. Lighting was also a very important part of my piece, as I opted to use very unrealistic and stylised lighting, often with coloured filters, in order to emphasise the surreal nature of the dream. Sound proved to be vital as well, as I made sure that the audio always felt based somewhere other than reality. I achieved this through using background ambience of settings, completely out of place in the setting of my work – an example being underwater sounds whilst a character is in a car. All of these film elements ultimately complemented the dream qualities that I was attempting to convey.

Video 1:

Screener: