The most significant aspect that I’ve learnt about myself through my recent course in Multimedia and Digital art is that my greatest attraction to art is in creating and exploring characters through film and narrative. I feel my strongest technical aspect is working and editing film along with its components of lighting and sound. Through the Honours course of Multimedia and Digital Arts I greatly hope to develop my creativity and technical proficiency in those directions.
My proposed direction in narrative explores the mindset of a protagonist exploring a surreal world in which it holds different spaces and objects all symbolically significant to the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind. The exploration involves a real person in a surreal world confronting animated characters one at a time in a strange home that doesn’t limit itself to what a house should look like.
Inspiration and direction for the subject matter and narrative will be explored through my own personal experiences in life and represented through the understandings of Kokology. Kokology, the study of the mind or spirit through guided daydreams or submodalities reveal one’s hidden attitudes towards life as well as provide clearer insight to one’s perceptions on things. Based on my personal understanding of myself and attitude towards work, play, career and life in general I intend to symbolically present these issues with animated characters, situations and environments. I have not been able to create a full synopsis of the narrative at this stage because of the need for research to find suitable characters to create. One example in Kokology is it presents you with a picture of an empty deep sea with a single coral on the sea floor, the book talks of octopuses and asks for you to draw however many octopuses of any size on the picture given. It reveals to you later that the octopuses in relation to size and closeness to the coral are problems you currently face in life; the larger the octopus the bigger the problem, the closer to the coral the more important you feel it is to resolve that problem. As this is a personal piece, instead of presenting the viewer with just the situation I place myself as the protagonist interacting with the situation accordingly. If the need be further research to gather inspiration for narrative will include exploring the psycho-analytic notions of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, as Kokology was greatly influenced by the two.
The visual styles that I lean towards more are of baroque lighting, strong shadows and vivid colours with a minimalistic approach for the details of the animated characters. With the use of green screen technology and keying out specific colours I intend to portray the protagonist with a fixed texture for his clothing. I find this relevant to the surrealistic approach and representation of the character, and I am quite keen to create a live action character with a prominent textured clothing style that I have only seen in animated film; animations such as Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo and cartoon network’s Chowder. The fixed texture being ‘unreal’ will be useful in creating mood for the character as the colours and texture could change/animate to portray such moods. A grey and cloudy texture could emphasize melancholy while a yellow texture could present joy.
The environment itself will change from room to room as the protagonist explores this surreal universe. For example the protagonist could walk into a dark small kitchen to confront a large dark figure with glowing eyes, have tea with it and exit the room to find himself on a beach. This theme of entering different ‘rooms’ is a common visual metaphor for exploring ones subconscious and/or conscious mind. Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (2000) portrays the protagonist entering the antagonist’s mind seeking answers. The different rooms in the antagonists mind symbolically explain why and how he is a serial killer, from portraying rooms of his perverse and demented obsessions with women to theatrical recollections of his tormented past as an innocent young boy. Another great influence to me portraying the beauty of surrealism is Salvador Dali. His fantastic landscapes and works that explore the metaphorical approach to revealing the workings of the mind are greatly relevant to my own proposed piece. His dream-like subject matter gathers elements and subjects from the real world but portrays them in an unreal situation that are better understood symbolically. However unlike Dali’s works that entice the viewer to explore the piece I use a live action protagonist to play the role of the explorer.
Honors from a technical standpoint would give me the great opportunity for research aimed at learning more about filming techniques, camera and lens capabilities, green screen technology, onset lighting and further my capabilities in creating and combining 2d animation with live action environments. Furthering myself in these aspects would greatly help me create more expressive, higher quality works, both through filming and animation.
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