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PRODUCTION Somna addresses the question of fragmented identity in the beginning of the 21 st century. Three visual motifs will be implemented throughout the course of the film: the protagonist's dreams will be rotoscoped (Fig. 1) , his “real” life will be comprised of normal footage, and his virtual experiences will be machinima shot within the game World of Warcraft (Fig. 2). The protagonist has a tri-partite identity: his dream self (a young woman), his concrete self (a young man), and his virtual avatar (an elf, or something equally exotic). In his lucid dreams, he's a young woman experiencing lush landscape transformations and interacting with highly eccentric dream entities . As the film progresses, he awakes to his normal tangible life, in which he is involved with a woman he's deeply in love with. His in-game avatar is an established veteran, ranking in the leadership of his guild . On a particular evening, while en route to rendezvous with some in-game friends, he'll basically lag out of the game, but he'll awake in bed, in a semi-excited state. Had he dreamt? He'll look at his computer, turned off, wondering where he just was. So on and so forth… The film will intentionally make ambiguous the distinction between reality, dream, and virtual life. I may begin the film with a clear establishment of which world the different visual motifs should signify, but not that they do necessarily signify those worlds. This play on setting is meant to beckon the viewer to attempt to validate reality, and within which reality lie truly ourselves? I mean to emphasize the perceptual alteration of reality brought on by experiences within all three of these realms. ============================== CAST
============================== Rotoscoping was pioneered when film was a relatively new medium. It involved the drawing atop each frame of a filmstrip, so as to integrate animation effects in a live-action sequence. Today, with digital video editing tools, it's much simpler (and less permanently investing) to apply rotoscoping techniques. There are a variety of techniques that can be employed, depending on the desired effect, but after ex The virtual environments I will be using will be within a machinima format. Machinima is basically video game cinema, wherein the filmmaker uses the game world, characters, and in-game tools to create a film. Using frapps, a Some would agree that memories from virtual adventures are comparable if not more vivid than memories of many real-life experiences (speaking from personal and shared experience). And the same can be said for dreams; many of us wake up in the morning incredibly disappointed at having been ripped away from an excellent lucid dream by our alarm clock. Finally, there are those of us whose fond memories are based strictly in reality. I hold memories from all three close to my heart, and hope to elicit mutual sentiments in the audience. The tone of the film will remain neutral, not suggesting that one realm is more superior then the other. The point is to establish that they're all starting to level off in their role of shaping identity through experience. |
perimenting a bit, I've deduced that I'll probably be using two methods. Adobe Premiere allows the user to export a filmed sequence as a filmstrip or a batch of single-frame images. Those images can then be batch-processed through Photoshop, using the “cutout” filter (I'm currently looking for a better one, but can't seem to find one at the moment). The filter effectively rotoscopes each image for you, and then it's possible to re-insert the batch into the premiere timeline. Voila, you have rotoscoping. The effect is adequate, but definitely not exactly how I'd like it. So I'll most likely be using that technique as a basis upon which I can detail the sequence (frame-by-frame UGH!) with the Wacom tablet. 
free video capturing application, I will use World of Warcraft as my digital set. The portions of the film that take place in-game will probably take up about the same amount of time as the other three sections, and should be fairly straightforward. Unlike the rotoscoping sequences, however, I can't add anything to the WoW setting besides what's available to me, so I'll technically have less freedom within that environment, but I have a few “locations” scouted out for filming already, so it should still be effective.