Film compositor Adam Sager made this beautiful short film for Halloween with his family. He’s created a perfect old dream film that celebrates the holiday by being mysterious, spooky and gorgeous. This guy has got some amazing work under his belt, including work credited as paint & roto artist on the feature film ‘Coraline.’
Tag Archives: dream
First Video Images Ever Reconstructed From the Human Brain
UC Berkeley scientists have recorded the first images ever generated by a human brain. Amazing. They exposed subjects to video images while recording visual activity in their brains. When they played the recorded data back they got images corresponding closely to what the subjects had just seen. What I notice about the images in the video is that faces seem to work the best. That is interesting on many levels. Perhaps facial recognition is so hard-wired into humans that we are able to generate those images more clearly than all others. This work opens the door to the ability to reconstruct imagery from dreams and memories. It’s a staggering achievement. Magnificent. I simply cannot wait to try this sometime.
Thank you to Rob Smart on Facebook.
Tribune-American Dream Picture – 1924 Surrealist Film Contest Winner
In 1924, the Oakland Tribune and American Theatre held a contest in which people submitted their dreams. The winning dreams got made into films and the dreamers won $25. This surreal piece came from a dream submitted by Mrs. L.L. Nicholson. It more closely resembles a dream than many films since then, including Hitchcock’s Spellbound. It involves a couple on a trip and a missing baby.
Film: Fellini’s Death
Jeff Alu is a photographer making films who I met at the Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. Cool guy. He’s also made this perfectly dream-like dream sequence that’s a part of his in-production film, 12 Dreams. I look forward to seeing all twelve! We had a brief discussion at the opening night of the film festival about the cameras we use and the filming of dream sequences. I said I thought they were kind of difficult, but Jeff clearly stated that no, I was wrong, they are easy! Well, they are easy for him and I like what he ends up with. The Fellini thing comes through clearly. Alu is onto it somehow. The pillow fight is extraordinary and I think the inclusion of the tabletop city model is brilliant.
During the film festival week in downtown L.A. they played Alu’s film on a video monitor in one of the galleries at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. I love watching gallery films and Fellini’s Death look great there.
Horror Film: The Nightmare
Joseph Chrisitiana made this excellent low-budget short horror film. His lead actor is his young son who does a wonderful job under truly creepy and nightmarish circumstances. The film moves with the horrifying logic of a true nightmare, with one certain death situation leading illogically but believably into another. This film had me totally with it the whole way through to its brilliant ending.
Joseph Christiana, producer and founder of Christiana Productions, is a self-taught New York-based guerrilla writer/director. He has produced no-budget feature and short films which have been received enthusiastically at various film festivals, on indie film websites and on short film cable television shows.
I found this via Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film which has a review of the film.
Animation: The Astronomer’s Dream
The Astronomer’s Dream is by Malcolm Sutherland. I can hardly make any sense out of it but I see endless repetition, making of the same mistakes over and over again, Buddhism, the serpent eating its own tail, ancient Mayan predictions and star observations, evolution, looking out equals looking in. That’s all I can make of it. It’s a strange piece of work. I like all the little lines and dashes in the weirdo drawings.