Dream Sequences - research

I have decided to make one of the two scenes I am doing for my project a dream sequence. This brings up lots of new things for me to consider, both narratively and stylistically. This post is the result of such considerations.

Narrative

According to Mark Montgomery (2010), dream sequences can tell a lot without the need to draw out the story. Characters can be fleshed-out and developed into three-dimensional personas, with events of characters' pasts usually affecting and/or influencing the sequence in some way.

 The most difficult parts of a dream sequence are often getting in and getting out of it. The transitions needs to be jarring enough to let audiences know that they're no longer in the real world, but not so jarring that they take the audiences out of the universe the film/show has created for them. Transitioning into a dream sequence is irrelevant to me as I am beginning my show with a dream sequence, but I will need to think about how to get out of the dream. Currently, I am thinking of doing an audio match, where a noise heard in the dream slowly normalises until it can be identified as a ringing phone, at which point reality will be cut to with a shot of a ringing phone. 

Style

One of the key things that makes dream sequences identifiable as dream sequences is how they are approached stylistically. Extremes of focal depth, odd camera angles & movements, extreme lighting, shadows & colours, soft focus, filters, and many more techniques can be employed to create the sense of unreality sought in dream sequences. 


On top of this, trippy dream sequences need to contain trippy events. Style is never everything, and in order for things to feel off in a dream sequence, something physical needs to be off in the frame. The example to the right from American Beauty (1999) is a good example of this. 

For me, I think that I will try to apply some of the above techniques, but I need to make sure not to go too far beyond the point of coherence, because that would probably not fit the remit of ITV. 












Comments

  1. Caroline Birks11 July 2018 at 14:16

    Is it also worth looking at the most famous of dream sequences - the one from Vertigo? A little dated in terms of what you are trying to achieve but interesting in terms of Hitchcock's ideas.

    ReplyDelete

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