Lina Lee

https://soundcloud.com/leelina44/nightmare-before-wakeup

Nightmare Before Wakeup

When we first got the assignment I knew immediately that I wanted to do something that had to do with dreams. I started researching dreams and dream analysis. I read about Freudian vs Jungian analysis, I didn’t delve into the neo-freudian or the neo-jungian for simplicity’s sake. I found out about dream analysis, where the analyst (a step up from a therapist) would listen to the patient’s dream and let the patient work out what the dream was about. In away, they used dreams as a way to delve into the patient’s subconscious. I learned about the four stages of REM sleep; sleep onset, light sleep and stage deep sleep and deeper sleep.

Originally I wanted my audio to be about waking up from a dream. But I realized that the dream needed to be specific so I choose the audio to be about waking up from a nightmare.

I wanted the structure of the video to be; deep sleep to waking up to consciousness. To achieve that I used recordings of my step dad half asleep. I had about 12 or so voice recordings of my step dad half conscious, so I knew I had some editing to do. I listened to the 12 or so tracks I have of his voice and edited out parts that were cleaner and parts where there were prolonged talking. This condensed about 5 hours of recording to about 30 bite sized video bits. I acquired the alarm tone and the ‘heavy breathing’ from online. I spent about a week walking around and recording whatever seemed relevant to the project from that I acquired the room ton and the bed crumpling noise. For the room tone, I used a recording of a siren from my room. FOr the bed crumpling noise, I left the recorder on a couple of times while I was making the bed.

Editing was interesting. I realized that lynda has the answers, but I had to weed through a massive amount of information in order to get to a simple answer. So I used a combination of lynda and adobe forms. Mostly I used the speed tool to play with the speed and tone of the sounds. I used Channel Volume to make transitions smoother and the volumes reasonably level where it was suppose to be. I used the razor tool to make cuts where I wanted to the second, this by far was the most useful tool I learned. For example, I had gotten the ‘heavy breathing’ clip from online, I wanted to make it longer so I cut and pasted a part of the ‘heavy breathing’ to the full heavy breathing audio to make it longer and more believable. I used pan during the dream sequence the most to make it feel like the sounds were coming from different sides of the room.  

In relation to Cheon’s modes of listening I used both Reduced and Causal listening. Throughout the dream sequence, there is speech that’s slowed down, you can’t really tell if someone’s talking or if it’s noise. I would say this aspect of the audio byte involves Reduced listening, because the words in the speech isn’t what matters–it’s the mood that the drawling voice gives. I used my dad saying “Maybe it’s karma, maybe it’s…” throughout the dream sequence as well, these words don’t really have a meaning in their own. The words are used to set the mood of the piece and get information about what’s going on inside of the dreamer’s mind.

Both audio bites from online are from freeaudio.com

https://youtu.be/cAYICwlqJUY

Lina Lee

Time: Metropolis

Video+Sound

When I first got started on the video and the sound portion of the project it was a bit daunting. When I was creating the video, instead of working on top of the audio and muting, I started a new project. This is because when I was working on top of the audio, even though it was muted, I kept trying to sync the video to the audio. The format of the audio is in a dream, waking up; thus, the video followed that.

I copied and pasted the audio to the video file, and listened to it with our editing it first. I realized that even though they were created separately, when put together, it worked. Not a lot of things need to be changed. The best part of, the firstness and secondness, and the modes of listening didn’t need to be compromised as much as I feared. In the bed, neither the video nor the sound changed much when it was combined.

Of course certain parts need to be cut and re-transitioned. Such as the audio’s breathing, it was much too long for the video, and the figure in the video wasn’t trembling as much as the sound was implying. Instead of a long audio bite of breathing, I broke it up to match the figure when on the bed and when the figure first got off. I also had to sync when the person woke up in the video to the audio. It was evident that the audio had a larger emphasis on the nightmare and the video had a larger emphasis on the conscious stage. Which all in all helped the final product to feel more balanced between the waking and the dreaming states together.

https://youtu.be/h7QzIiveR90

Lina Lee

Time: Metropolis

Dream Sequence

The video without audio has two portions. The dream state and the waking state. I wanted to express those as different entities while keeping in mind theories from Deleuze and Peirce as well as well as the editing tools learned from “The Cutting Edge.”

The video is about a dream, specifically a nightmare so I wanted the setting to reflect that. When we got to the video portion I wanted to use streets, to make it feel like the person was walking for ages. But that sequences turned out to be quite dull to watch, so I decided take multiple sequences of my dorm hallway. Still going with the theme of walking, I walked several times from the elevator to the door. In editing terms, I made a montage (or gaseous shots) of someone walking several times to a door. The lights in the hallway was covered entirely by red sheets of paper to give it a red tint. I thought that this would be an appropriate setting for a nightmare. The whole hallway was decorated for halloween but the left side was a bit haggard looking, while the right side was neater. For the first to scenes walking towards the door, I used the right side of the hallway. For the last scene, I used the left side, because the right side had stickers all over their door but the left side didn’t. Originally, the left side door was opened at the end, so the aesthetics of the door mattered a bit more.

The conscious state’s setting is in my dorm room. It was a striking enough difference in terms of the color pallet, white vs red that I decided to keep it like that. I also didn’t add additional tint to the conscious state because it’s suppose to depict morning time in the real world, in real life.

In terms of composition, the dream state is incredibly symmetrical. This was so that I could editing in a set of eyes, and it wouldn’t be too jarring because eyes are also symmetrical. Also this allowed me to add split screens and play witht eh symmetry in those. The shots are mostly close up shots in tandem with long shots of the hallway juxtaposed on top of each other or next to teacher. This allows the viewer to see what the walker is looking at and what the walker is thinking through their eyes. The longshots of the hallways allowed the view to make an objective inference that the walker was in the hallway; while, the close ups of the eye let the view into what the walker was feeling. The dream sequence, in terms of Peirce’s modes, is an example of firstness. It’s what the walker sees, and just what it sees, not really thinking about computing information or an action through viewing another thing.

The composition of the waking state is balanced, but not exactly symmetrical. The scene when the dreamer wakes up is balanced between the figure and the empty space and the bedding–but it’s not symmetrical. Between the unconscious and conscious state, I wanted a transition–but I still wanted it to be abrupt. So I added a montage of scenes transitioning ontop of one another, but fading in layers to view the door handle, then a jump cut to a person waking up. There was a scene where the person is rumbling around, but it was cut to directly depict the person mid-jolting awake. This was to create a sharp contrast to the dream state and to show the viewer it is morning. Also to show a reaction to the dream from the dreamer–when the dreamer jolts up and carefully reaches for the door, this is an example of secondness. It shows the effect of the dream on the person, the fear it caused them.