Expanding upon storyline for more visual complexity:


As you create your VJ sets, think about the space you are asking the viewer to inhabit.

How can you make it more believable, more immersive?



Surrealism and Dreams

Freud talks about the dream-formation as consisting of two parts: the dream content and the dream thought. The dream thought is the unfulfilled wish, which is driven by its own gratification. The dream content is the result, which we consciously register and remember in a dream. The dream content is transformed into the manifest content by three distinct phases: condensation, displacement and representation.

Condensation is when several wishes or thoughts are condensed into a smaller ideal.

Displacement takes these ideals and replaces them with other elements, to disguise them from the conscious.

Representation is the converting these disguised thoughts into a series of images, which become the "dream" that is remembered in the morning.

The Surrealists used dreams and fragments within their artwork and films. They treat the fragment apart from its original context. They developed techniques of film viewing based on these strategies for example entering in the middle of a film and leaving when they began to figure out the plot, or watching films through a grill made with fingers. The Surrealists used fragmentation as a means to knowledge, discovering significance in the fragment that had been concealed in the contextualized whole. They also experimented with reassembled film edits to reveal poetic dimensions.

The Surrealist viewer was more like a poet or philosopher, taking the desired fragment and re-imagining it, ignoring the rest. Surrealist filmmakers, like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, used several strategies from Surrealist film criticism in their filmmaking practices, including the "jumbling" of images, a discontinuity between image and sound, far-fetched analogies, and personal fetishes.

Because of the condensed storytelling methods used by animation, surrealistic approaches can easily be utilized to give us more value to smaller things.

Things to consider:

Using symbolic imagery

Evoking moods rather than fully explaining the entire reason for a mood

Condensing stories- finding the most important elements of the story

Thinking more poetically than literally. For example, a man loses his job, goes to the river and drowns himself (happy thoughts). We could show the man getting into his car, driving to his job, meeting his boss, having a conversation, packing his things, leaving his office, etc. Ten years later! Since it would take us that long to animate all that stuff we would wonder why we started to begin with! So think of shortcuts, but POETIC shortcuts to tell the story better. Show an alarm clock, a man at his desk, a slammed door with muffled sounds, dragging feet, a box being packed and some gray skies and then…. You get the picture! Not only is it shorter, but it becomes more interesting. Don’t spell everything out for the audience. Suggest and let them do some work, it is more fun for them and for you.

When using animation:
Think of composition- think like you are using a camera… Remember-- Close-ups, medium-shots, full shots, wide/panoramic shots, one-two-three shots (focusing on people or a group in a medium shot), over-the-shoulder (usually for a two person conversation.

Composition Tips:
The way that the subjects in a shot relate to each other communicates a lot about what’s going on in the story. For example, a wise shot with a single subject often represents isolation.

Subjects in a shot rarely have a perfectly balanced relationship to each other and to the environments.

Don’t forget the action/title safe area. Leave about 10 percent of the screen free at the edges.

Thing about depth- just because you’re working in 2D doesn’t mean your character have to live in a 2D world.

Putting the story together-

Watch for familiar patterns- this could be visually, or camera shots.

Look for sequences that show cause and effect

Watch for sequences that have implied meaning

Movement from one shot to another is often anticipated by your characters actions.

Look for scenes that build suspense.

More experimental:

Cut-up: Writer and artist William Burroughs would write a novel and then cut it to pieces, reassembling it in a completely different manner. You could edit an animation in that same way.

Visual effect- Edit according to visual relationships. A pattern in one scene could relate to an abstract animation of that pattern in another, etc.

Symbolic- In Un Chien Andalou, the edits follow a dream logic. Often we jump from one scene to another through image relationships, similar to a dream. We see a moon with a cloud passing, we cut (literally) to a woman’s eye.

Edit according to mood

Edit according to soundAdditional editing and cinematography tips- Film Directing Shot by Shot by Stephen Katz