Tonight I went to a presentation of Belief’s Untitled:003-EMBRYO organized by the Vancouver ACM Siggraph group. The short film was presented with a talk by Mike Goedecke, writer and director of the film and founder of Belief, on the creative process.
I think I missed the creative process part. He talked for a while at the beginning and showed us some samples of Belief’s motion graphics work. I liked what he had to say but quite immediately I realized that I was at a gig for design folk. Not to say that designers are bad, or that I don’t secretly dream of one day working for a hip design firm, sitting at an ironically shaped desk wearing coordinated frames and scarf combos and talking about my process. But I’m not there right now so I couldn’t truly appreciate what he was saying. BTW I’m not trying to mock anything. Seriously…that’s how I imagine it.
We left after the screening (9pm gets a little late for me these days) but the film was okay. There were definitely some nice visuals and effects to be had. Still, again because I couldn’t appreciate Untitled 003 from a designer, or filmmaker, or graphics person point of view, I was left a little un-blownaway.


On the way home I was thinking about my disenchantment. I went there thinking the film would be very conceptual, very high level, using visuals and audio to express something but leaving a lot to the imagination. Instead, Untitled 003 had a storyline - a cool one too. Actually the way they did it is they had a “contest” of sorts where people could send the company their dreams and several dreams were chosen to be part of the film, the owners of the dreams not knowing anything about the final product.
The story was about this agoraphobic guy who finds a “dream-machine” contraption waiting at his door one day. The machine required that he place a helmet that captures dreams on the heads of 5 different people. The dreams were then fed to this gremlin-type monster living inside the machine. Each time he stole a vision, he would see it played back on the dream machine and this of course gave him a great sense of euphoria thus moving the film along quickly because he wanted more dreams.
My problem with the film was this: as soon as they introduced a story, I wanted to see see SEE everything that would make that story seem real. I want to really experience it. Show me what someone is dreaming I want to know! I want to feel like I’m watching my own dreams. But I didn’t. I felt like I was watching a commercial, or a music video. I felt very desensitized to the experience they were trying to give me. Why? Here are some of my thoughts:
1. The final dream sequences (I think there were 6) seemed to be driven by graphics tools or techniques rather than by an initial vision.
2. The story built itself up almost Disney style (seriously the beginning…Phantom Tollbooth) and, given the shorter length of the film, it felt really rushed. On top of that, the dreams take you away from the story, are really abstract, and while they give you some information on the characters to whom they belong, there’s no other time for you to develop an attachment to the character thus have a strong interest in what the dream tells you.
3. In his presentation Mike talked about how our perceptions are based on our belief systems. He gave the classic “which colour is darker?” example where they are both actually the same colour. Another was a sentence being read repeatedly with an increasing amount of distortion. By the end you can still hear the sentence. Do the process backwards and start with distortion, the sentence becomes audible around midway between distortion and clarity. This happens because in the first case, we are able to establish a frame of reference. So…
I figure that I had no frame of reference while watching these dream sequences. I couldn’t develop any interpretation because they seemed too abstract, too fake. My dreams can be pretty crazy, but they are always somewhat based on my reality and that’s what makes them weirder. It’s not the fact that I had to bathe in a community jacuzzi with a built in soap bucket and everyone stored their soap in there so it became one large mass of soaps and I couldn’t find mine so I ended up using someone else’s that was weird. It was that all the soaps in that bucket were from Lush. It astonished me that everyone who used the community jacuzzi used Lush soap!
Based on this last point (3), what would I do to make the film more likeable (by me)? In the dream sequence I would give the audience a frame of reference and then I would take that away. Make them think something is real, believable, and then blow their minds.
(holy crap this is long)
Of course I’m not saying that everything should go like this. I’m also probably totally missing the goal of making the film and where it sits in the design / art world and all the theory given to it by that. I was prepared to see it from that viewpoint, but he lost me as soon as it went into a fantasy-like story. So from the viewpoint of a spectator…
He did show a piece that I really did like - Manstray. Go to that page…click on “VIEW MOVIE”…it’s hilarious!!!