Friday, February 12, 2010

KAHORYAO STORY - DREAMS


The story is about dreams. A man lives in dreams; he travels from one dream to another dream using ‘Dreamcatcher’ as the portal. The man steals dreams and replaces them with nightmares. He does so for has been cursed to do this.
The thoughts I would like to evoke in the viewers minds: The helplessness of not being in control, the idea of the unexplainable things. Etc. I want the scenes to be dark.
A dreamcatcher the inanimate form of the word for "spider", is a handmade object based on a willow hoop, on which is woven a loose net or web. The dreamcatcher is then decorated with personal and sacred items such as feathers and beads.
Characters: 1. The protagonist is human in general, and in the story it is represented by a  young man.                   
                      2. The antagonist is a character that exists only in dreams. He is an old man.
                      3. The third character is a crow who is the ‘watcher’. What a ‘watcher’ does is it keeps an eye on what the antagonist does, and make sure he does his job, and maybe even give more power to the antagonist. The irony is that the crow itself is a servant just like the antagonist (old man). There is a greater power operating and forcing them to do what they are doing.
The story is not a normal story where there is a beginning and an end; it is more of an incident.
Visualisation:  It starts with a close up of a dreamcatcher hanging motionless; the background is dark. The camera cuts to a close up of a face of a man sleeping intently. (Back to the 1st shot) Suddenly, the dreamcathcer begins to flutter. Then gory images; flashes of a scary old man laughing (abnormally big mouth), chopped body parts, but somewhere always in the picture is a dreamcatcher. There aren’t any hint as to what is going on, just the dreamcatcher; it is hidden in every frame( of the dream sequence), which will probably make not much sense but just enough to keep the viewer intrigued to what the dreamcatcher is doing there. Different images to make a nightmare flashes (here I feel I have some space to squeeze in some interesting things maybe even images in sequence telling a story). Then suddenly, a mid shot of the young man waking up to find himself sweating profusely. The room is dark and almost bare, the few furniture are the bed on which the man was sleeping, a small table beside the bed, and on top of it is an old table lamp, a clock, there is also a cupboard with few books on it, and a dreamcatcher hanging just above the bed, and it is swinging slowly. The man is sitting up still dazed and sweating.  Then the camera zooms out, through the window, and it keeps zooming until a point where we introduce the crow, which in perched on a branch but we see only it’s back, the crow is looking at the man through the window. In the last shot, the crow’s flown away.

Here, I also thought of another scenario where the old man trapped in the dream was trying to talk to the man dreaming. He is trying to come to this universe with the man's help/through the man.

2 comments:

  1. You have a seed of an idea. Hellraiser?
    Flesh it out.
    Get rid of the vagueness.

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  2. I dont want you to show me references that you want to be mimetic about. I want you to use the story to visualise. If I do not see you working out your own style and approach it is of no use.
    Now that you have a skeleton of a story and you seem to be having problems fleshing it out in words - do the following:
    1. Use references but I would rather see your own work emerge. So use references sparingly and selectively.
    2. If you have fixed your characters, where are the character explorations? Because without these, you will have no consistent characters.
    3. You still have to flesh the story out - what is the rising action, what is the climax? Or is it just going to be a series of frames that you want done cinematically?
    4. If you are coming from the visual exploration space - you need a series that is held together underneath by a story. If the story is not there, it will fall.
    5. So if you take above path as you seem to be inclined to - do the pages as thumbnails which are quite strong and then let us see what happens to the story.
    6. You've lost a whole week - now run.

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