Video
PW: digasg4
Gif
Artist Statement
I always have dreams during sleeping, some I forgot the next morning, but some I could remember the details for a long time. For me I feel it’s amazing that even when people are fall asleep, they can still experience something that might never happened in their real life. Even though the “world” is fake, those emotion it evoke, the sweet and hurt, the nervousness and desperation, the happiness and sadness, all of them are true. That’s the reason why I like having dreams even it might be a nightmare.
Based on this idea, I want to use an abstract moving image to show the interesting experience of dreaming. It starts from darkness when we close our eyes and fall into asleep, then things happened. Dreaming is kaleidoscopic, dream changes time to time and you don’t know what is going on next, but it’s definitely colourful. Then when it comes to the end things start to fade and we wake up because of the light.
Technical Decisions
For this moving image the main effect I used is CC Kalaida to imitate the experience of dreaming which is fantasy and moody. To achieve this in After Effect, just simply go to Effect menu and inside “Style” you can find it. To make the patterns moving I animated the center point to move. Then use fade out effect to combine several images with different color themes. That’s how I make the kaleidoscope background.
The other important effects I used are channel blur and add noise. Because this time my artist reference is Ninagawa Mika, so I make the image
Working Process
Photoshop
Before
After
For human figure, I’m still using the same picture from project 2, but this time I edit the picture differently. This time I increase the saturation since I took Ninagawa Mika’s photos as reference. Her work has a very bright and rich color, the image is also a bit blur to create the illusion feeling.
The I go find the pictures I needed for this assignment. My concept is I sleeping on bed, so I need a top view of bed. For this one I use photoshop to move out the original baby on the bed and leave the blank bed sheet.
After Effect
After edit the figure in Photoshop, I start to work on After Effect. First I make the kaleidoscope background by using the effect I mentioned just now. Then saved the background as one composition.
Next open a new composition, put bed picture as background, then the kaleidoscope and human. For the kaleidoscope composition add a circle shape mask. It will look like the picture above.
Then add in the camera layer. Because the whole picture is rotating, to make thing easy and avoid any bug, I decide to rotate the camera instead of 3 images layers. Then the camera also move in and out to the picture to represent the process of falling asleep and waking up. This movement also feels like breathing.
The last step is to adjust the image. I add one adjustment layer to increase the saturation. This is to make the color brighter and richer.(Later I duplicate one more color adjustment layer just for the background because the human picture has already increase saturation in Photoshop.)
Then I put one more adjustment layer to create the blur effect and noise in the picture. And it becomes like this below.
Before
After
Artists References
1. Gold Fish – Ninagawa Mika
Ninagawa Mika is a famous Japanese photographer. The color of her works is bright and vibrant. And they create a fancy and dreamy feeling to the audience. And that’s what I’m looking for for this project.
2. Memories of Matsuko
This is the part when Matsuko dead and we audience look back at her life. In this part the movie becomes very colourful which shows the childlike simplicity and also hint that these are all unrealistic, they are just Matsuko’s beautiful imagination.
3. Hey Morning Elegance – Oren Laive
This is a stop-motion short film which shows a girl is dreaming about her daily life and boyfriend. All the scenes are done on the bed and this is where my inspiration comes from.