Experimental/ self- portrait project: Dreams

I decided to base my self portrait project on my dreams and sleep habits. Falling asleep has always been hard for me as an ex sufferer of insomnia, so I wanted to convey the state where you enter sleep and the abstract patterns you see when your eyes are shut and your brain begins to rest. I decided to do a StopMotion animation where I moved around different coloured post it notes on my bedroom wall while I appear to be sleeping in the bed below.

Research and Story boarding

After doing a few test shots, where I filmed the sticky notes very roughly with my iPad, I was confident the technique would work well for my final experimental piece. However there were a few problems which I would need to think about and solve before shooting the final piece such as: keeping the camera still, having the same lighting and keeping the sticky notes flat. 

In preparation for shooting my animation I took out suitable filming equipment from the store, this included a stop-motion camera, tripod and laptop with dragon frame software on. Having the camera on a tripod, would minimise the risk of the camera moving and therefore make the filming stable and smooth. In the test shots the lighting is very distracting as it changes throughout the animation. This was caused by the natural lighting changing as the sun went down over a period of time. To make sure this wouldn't happen, and that the lighting would be constant throughout my final film, I blacked out my windows and made sure that my main bedroom light remained on. To stop the problem of the post it notes curling up, I made sure I had plenty of blue tack to stick them down flat against the wall.

The reason why I chose to work with post-it notes was because they resemble nothing representational and are instead purely abstract forms, they just make patterns. When I'm falling asleep I only see patterns so I thought this would be the perfect medium to work with. 

After animating for three days straight I imported my photo sequence into 'after effects' and 'premier pro' and began to edit. I knew when making my animation that I wanted a digital sounding song to be playing and the post- it notes to be moving in time to the song. After looking on YouTube for a while I came across the song ‘Eple’ by Royksopp, which is an upbeat electro pop track. I set about editing the movement of the post it notes to the beat, which is slow in some parts and very quick in others. 

After doing the main editing I created a photo mask over the video which went from the left hand corner of the room, down and across the horizontal of the headboard. I did this because I wanted to appear sleeping in the bed below, but couldn't physically as I was animating. I think the outcome of this effect works well as it looks likes my dreams are rising from my head and coming alive on my bedroom wall.

I'm overall very happy with the result of my animation, and I had a lot of fun in the process of making it! If I could change one thing, I would replace the photo mask of me in bed and change it for a video of me sleeping and moving around in bed! This would have made the transition of where I wake up less jolty!

Self- portrait animation