For the rest of this semester, I plan to explore dreams and how they can best be represented on film. The elements of dreams that particularly interest me are the surreal and absurd. Things like strange locations, strange characters and a weirdly accepted lack of logic, that all somehow manage to feel connected to reality, are all aspects that I want to capture. In terms of material, I plan to use my own dreams as direct inspiration, which I think will make these surreal elements come through strongly, rather than a forced cause and effect narrative that might come if I were to script them. One dream that I might use involves myself, David Bowie, Johnny Depp, drugs and poisonous gases.
For me personally, my dreams tend to fall into three categories: absurd/funny, scary/nightmare, or just kind of anxiety based. So throughout the rest of the semester I plan to focus on both these absurd dreams and the nightmares, while also questioning whether or not they can coexist in film, as they often do in my head.
As well my own dreams, I also want to look to examples of dream sequences within films and films that just have a dreamlike sense, as I feel they can be useful in showing both what to do and what not to do in trying to capture a genuine dreamlike feel.
Louie – characters just being there with no intro
- slurred speech
- anxiety things – no pants, people booing etc
- slightly altered locations based on reality – bar is regular location in show
- strange scary thing being what wakes you up
In terms of what I will specifically be doing for the rest of the semester, I plan to shoot an ongoing amount of small videos experimenting with different ways of filming dreams. An example of this experimentation might be to take the same dream, and attempt to present it in different ways, such as funny, scary or both.
Another one of several rough ideas, could be to ask people about their own dreams, and proceed to take small details from each of them, collating them into one illogical dream sequence. This experimentation may lead to what could be called a more final piece, or it may just result in more experimentation. At this stage I’m unsure.
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