The Animated Self Development 5: Getting Reference

I knew that my animation for PPP was going to need a heck of a lot of reference to animate, particularly because when I tried to explain my idea to anyone, they didn't really understand what I was talking about, mainly commenting on the absurdity of the dream. My reply would always be 'don't worry, it'll all make sense...' but the fact no one understood the animation apart from me was a little bit worrying as I am trying to make this thing for an audience.

So I decided I needed a lot of reference and since I had my actors together; Oscar, Matt, Olly and James (who all appeared in my dream) and Lauren (playing me dreaming), I felt it would be more beneficial to simply act out the whole dream. This experience was very rewarding. Lauren was very good at playing the dreamer and Oscar was particularly good at giving me the expressionless, slightly creepy character I needed. Plus, upon playing back the footage, I was astonished how close it was to actual dream I had. The challenge was condensing down the footage into a 20 second segment but once it had all been trimmed I felt that I understood exactly how I would go about animating this thing.

When I came up with the idea to animate a past dream I was on a long train journey down to London and I decided to use my phone to record sounds of the train I was on. I was inspire to do this by dream sequences I had watched in The Sopranos. Whenever a character would dream you would often hear slightly odd noises that would not fit the surroundings. After recording three sound effects, I found that the most successful clip was the sound of a train approaching the platform I was on on the London Underground. Listening to it back I really liked how the noise would become more and more intense and felt that if I added it to my animation I could build a kind of sense of anticipation and dread, much like I feel people experience when they approaching the point of waking up in a dream.

Editing the footage together on Premier was a very fun experience and after decreasing the speed of the sound clip by fifty percent it made the clip that bit more creepy and unsettling. There's a really weird sounding voice and the end of the animation, just as the sound approaches it's peak of intensity that almost sounds like a witch casting a spell, but in actuality that noise is the slowed down voice of the automated platform announcer.

I was very happy with the footage and the feedback I received was also very positive with people commenting that it was quite David Lynch like, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at all inspired by David Lynch.