Topic: Dreams

I have just finished my 3 part series, "The Case of the Missing Strawberries" which was more of a practice for me as I want to perfect the process of making a brickfilm, and I will post it on Youtube and here once I make some changes to it. Anyway, I am working on an idea for a brickfilm with a more in depth story (one that the case of the missing strawberries does not have at all) and I want to perfect it and tweak it some more yet so I came up with an animation project that would not require quite as much story development that I could make while I am working on the story for the more serious one. The "in between" project I came up with was simply a boy having a dream. However, I do not want to make it realistic or meaningful dream (the kind in most books in movies), rather, I want to make one of the completely random dreams like the ones I have every now and again. You know the ones that don't make any sence and it seems to constantly morph and change one thing to another? I just thought this would be a fun project to do and there were just some specifics I was wondering about. Here's what I have so far:
It starts off with the boy going to bed and turning the lights off. There is some nice piano music playing. I was thinking the same music should just play through the entire dream because I know I've fallen asleep while music is playing before and I actually heard it in my dream. Then one of the big questions I've been going back and forth between, was whether to have narration or not. You might think at first that there should be no narration and the audience should be able to tell what's going on, on their own, but I also thought it since dreaming is such a mental thing, the narration could help to understand the boys thoughts. If I have narration it would be the boy who is dreaming narrating, but should he be telling it as if it happened in the past or in present tense? In the dream, I just wrote down stuff similar to what I have dreamed about in the past: a weird creature that doesn't exist, getting upset or even terrified about not upsetting/terrifying things, and things constantly changing around just for random reasons. It ends with him jumping off a tower, then he wakes up and it is morning.

Please tell me your thoughts on this or any input you have! My goal is not to tell a story, rather just have a "realistic" example of the sort of dream I have sometime. If you have any better idea, I will definatly consider it though. Nothing much is set in stone yet, but I would like to start rather soon. One of my goals of this project is to have more interesting and detailed sets. (when I post The case of the missing strawberries, you will see that the sets where just slapped together). Well, I hope I get some good responses because this was a lot of writing mini/smile

Update: this is the room where the film will start and end. I was playing around with the lighting to get day and night. This picture is morning. How could I improve the set? Does the bed look ok?

Last edited by brenden17 (November 10, 2010 (03:08pm))

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12980977/sigmachine.png
YouTube uncompleted project: filming not in progress

Re: Dreams

Sounds cool, but I wouldn't go with narration, especially if you're trying to make it like a normal dream. Don't feel the need to spell things out for the viewer, especially with dreams, because they are so strange in nature and never make sense anyway.

Oh, and I like the set. The lighting is nice.

Re: Dreams

About the room: He should probably have a blanket over him and you should give him a flat pillow.
You'd better fix the exposure on the face though.
For the night-time you might want to put in cricket sounds in the backround along with the music and then fade into the music as he falls asleep.  He should have his lights off when he wakes up, so you could use the window to stream the light in in the morning.
My opinion is for you to leave the narration out as i don't see any way of getting him to speak his thoughts.
Instead you'll have to make the sequence of events very smooth (it may be a bit of a daunting task).
Lastly you might want to use ripple transitions to acheive the effect of a dream.

I know precisely as much as i've learnt - m2c

Re: Dreams

m2c Studios wrote:

About the room: He should probably have a blanket over him and you should give him a flat pillow.
You'd better fix the exposure on the face though.
For the night-time you might want to put in cricket sounds in the background along with the music and then fade into the music as he falls asleep.  He should have his lights off when he wakes up, so you could use the window to stream the light in in the morning.
My opinion is for you to leave the narration out as i don't see any way of getting him to speak his thoughts.
Instead you'll have to make the sequence of events very smooth (it may be a bit of a daunting task).
Lastly you might want to use ripple transitions to achieve the effect of a dream.

just cloth for a blanket right? and what do you mean by a flat pillow you mean the smooth flat piece without any studs? I like your idea of having cricket sounds. The picture I posted is the one I intended to use for when he wakes up and I could just try and angle the lamp differently so that it doesn't shine directly on his face but I thought it looked like the sun was shining right on his face. I'm not going to use ripple transitions because that's not how you actually how you dream in the same sense that your thoughts aren't floating above your head in cloud bubbles.

Thanks for the input! I'm going to record the going to sleep and waking up parts today but If anyone has any idea for the dream itself, let me know even if its something entirely different than I said.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12980977/sigmachine.png
YouTube uncompleted project: filming not in progress

Re: Dreams

You should enter this into S.A.M. (Strange And Mysterious), it would fit so well!

Re: Dreams

Seems like Scypax's sorta movie

mini/smile