My dark side
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Logline:
The cockroaches force me to cope with myself.
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Concept
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My project is about my recurring nightmares with cockroaches. They are my greatest fear and yet I dream of them almost every night. They are the visual representation of my subconscious anxiety of losing control. When I fell overloaded by things I have to do I dream of cockroaches. These dreams are so realistic that I can’t tell wether I am awake or not when I see them: usually I find the cockroaches in my bed, and to make them stop I have to wake up and do what I have to. So I feel like the cockroach is my guide-animal, that helps me to keep a grip on my reality and forces me to do what I tend to postpone in my life. Unconsciously, I use my fear of cockroaches against myself and my tendency to feel overwhelmed by commitments.
The visual translation of all this, as we can see in my one minute short video, is a trembling sequence of images of myself sleeping in my bed, surrounded by the usual sounds of my bedroom: my clock, my breath, the blankets and the ambient sound from out the window. During this sequence, hand-sketched and shrieking cockroaches appear and disappear. They finally stop when I open my eyes. My voice over (monologue) tells about the nightmare I may have: it also stops when I wake up at the end.​
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FIRST DRAFTS
REALITY: “Normal” shooting (24frames x sec), Silence\ambient sound
DREAM: “flashes” of my dream world, same images of the reality but 12frames x second (stop motion) with hand-sketched cockroaches that walk on me. Sound: shrieking and creaking noise becoming louder and louder every flash.
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WHY?: The cockroaches are created by my mind in my dreams as they are created by my hand in my video. I am the cockroaches themselves.
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HOW? by printing 10/12 frames per second of the selected parts (the nightmare flashes, around 20 seconds of the minute = 200/240 frames) and drawing the walking cockroaches on them.
GENERAL IDEA FOR THE EDITING : Alternation of scenes from realty and flashes from the nightmare. Flashes become Louder and more frequent during the video.
DEVELOPING OF MY STORYLINE:
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EXPOSITION: Scene1: long shot (around 10 sec) of me sleeping quietly.
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RISING ACTION: Scene 2: first flash of my nightmares with cockroaches, reality becomes troubled.
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CLIMAX: the flashes become more frequent and louder: you cannot say what is real and what is not.
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FALLING ACTION: The cockroaches retreat.
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RESOLUTION: I Wake up
​Inspiration:
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FRANZ KAFKA, THE METAMORPHOSIS: nightmare logic, there is no escape, man turned into a cockroach.
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LUIS BUNUEL: UN CHIEN ANDALOU (ANTS SCENE) : Use of surrealistic images: world of the unconscious, no differences between what is real and what is not: searching under the surface of things, dreamlike image combinations. There is not a story.
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GUSTAV KILMT portait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1907: Use of symbols as an expressive way to frame a portrait. The subject is literally covered by Symbols that are the key for the interpretation of the picture.
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RENE MAGRITTE, The son of man: Surrealistic painting: he starts representing reality and insinuates doubts about it, without any kind of interpretation, he doesn’t want either to analyze it or portray it, he just want to show the indefinability of it.
