Sweet Dreams
produced by: Ngoc Vo
Inspiration & Concept
For many of us, dreams are an almost intangible presence. Our dreams can be soothing or scary, mysterious or helpful, and realistic or fantastical. Sometimes we wake up and have no idea that we’ve dreamed, while other times, we can closely recall our dreams because they were so intense. These are known as vivid dreams. Vivid dreams can be positive or negative, realistic or fantasy. Sleeping issues that cause a lack of sleep, such as insomnia and narcolepsy, can increase one’s risk of experiencing vivid dreams. Most heavy dreaming occurs during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep normally cycles every 90 minutes during a night of sleep and may last 20 to 25 minutes. About 25 percent of an adult’s night of sleep is spent in REM cycles, the quite same percentages of dreams we remember each night.
What happened IN the rest?
'Sweet Dreams' is a fantasy of an insomniac through pixels, inspired by The Void - visual representation of Eleven's mind (Stranger Things) while using extrasensory perception to locate other entities in different locations to her own.
In Sweet Dreams, everything is colourless. The contrast of black and white means that person viewing the dream as an observer, and not experiencing the events first-hand. It represents distance from oneself and the emotional events being seen happening. The two phases of Sweet Dreams are entering/leaving the dreams (white graphic on black background) and inside the dream (black graphic on white background). The pixels emphasise the fleeting/blurry feeling of trying to recall the dreams, inspired by Daniel Rozin's Circles Mirror.
Technical
I wanted to create more organic curves and loops animation, hence the heavy use of sin/cos/tan. The ghosting effect is created by drawing a rect with opacity 20% of background colour.
Further Development
I want to break away from just using "the computational cool style" black and white and incooporate more fun colours in my work. I can also see myself comeback for this to make more smooth transitions rather than jump cuts. The potential of bringing in sound is exciting, since it is something I am always interested in (and the reason why I start the course). Working on this project thoroughly with just dummy objects is something really unforeseen and understandable, so once lockdown is over, I will definitely experiment the scenes with projectors.
Self Evaluation
Overall, I am content with my first big creative coding/projection mapping experiment. Not only gaining massive amount of coding skills, I've also learned a lot more on handling visual impacts, story telling and time managing within 2-3 minutes. This is only the beginning, so the possilibities are endless. There are so many things right now I consider flaws, but I know they are the opportunities to improve.
References
Theo's Lab: Organic Typography
Theo's Lab: Revolving Doors
Michael Pinn's starfish: https://openprocessing.org/sketch/204759
Michael Pinn's Flower: https://openprocessing.org/sketch/157286
Daniel Rozin's Circles Mirror: http://www.smoothware.com/danny/circlesmirror.html
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