Do you have nightmares? Weird dreams that make you wake up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep? We, Dreamscape INC., could help you.
For this project we had to make groups of 3 - 5 and choose one of the prompts our teachers gave us. I gathered two of my friends and amazing artists, and we chose the prompt:"What if we could change someone's memories?". We also had to chose whether we wanted to make an animation, zine, interactive graphic novel or a VR narration and we chose for a interactive graphic novel.
We really wanted to work very experimental this semester so we came to the conclusion we wanted to explore the world of dreams. First we wanted to make a story about someone who could travel trough dreams, then we also had a plan of a company planting nightmares in people's head and then presenting themselves as the only people who could remove the nightmare.
That last idea really spoke to us. The 3 of us are all pretty interested in analog horror and other creepy stuff on the internet but we hadn't really been able to make something like that ourselves.
So we decided to make a ARG (Alternate Reality Game) about this company who made a machine which could translate brainwaves and turn them into images and video's. The player could take the quiz on the website of the company to participate in the research of Dreamscape INC. . But in the dreams there would be puzzels and codes hidden and with those you can log in the account of the boss of the company and find out what kind of company Dreamscape INC. really is.
My roles in this project were:
Producer
Art director
Storyboarder
Prop designer
(and a bit more)
The infomercial
Our main project was the quiz, but the quiz must be on a website, and how could people find the website? That's why we made an infomercial. One of the researchers could tell people what Dreamscape INC. is and why you would benefit from taking the quiz!
As the art director it was my job to make sure everyone was on the same page about how everything would look. So I searched on pinterest, youtube and other web-places. I am a fan of the show 'Maniac' on Netflix and took big inspiration from one of their 'infomercials'. The story takes place around the year 2000 and is made by a couple of scientists who know nothing about making videos, so the editing and pacing is a bit funny and crooked on purpose.
firstly I made a little storyboard for the infomercial so we knew exactly what we needed to film with our actor.
The music is made by Ezra, who absolutely nailed it.
I also bought a labcoat and designed a ID badge for our character Sven Mikkels. The labcoat has the Dreamscape INC. logo on the left upper arm and the text 'Dreamscape INC.' above the breast pocket. For the shooting day we also got a little clip on mic to finish the vibe of these researchers being a bit inexperienced about how to make a infomercial look professional.
And this is how the infomercial turned out! Desmond made the little pictures that resemble stock images a bit. I think this is definitely one of my favorite parts of this project. I love making the storyboard, the shooting day was very fun and the end result is (in my opinion) absolutely perfect.
The website itself
We really made it ourselves very difficult by wanting to build the website from scratch, making an infomercial, a working quiz, and the kind of backlogs with the story hidden in them. But Ezra knocked it out of the park with this one. They made the entire website with HTML and CSS with barely any experience with the both of them. The quiz was made in twine which they also only knew about since a couple of weeks and they put the informercial together within 2 days. And the story, which changed many times and is very complicated, is written so amazingly by Desmond. Yeah, I couldn't be prouder of these 2 people. It's absolutely insane how good this teamwork was and the fact that we finished this in time is so cool. I could ramble on hours and hours about these 2.
I once again made a little style guide. I really enjoyed being the art director. We all had our ideas about how everything would look but and we were most of the time on the same page on how stuff would look so this was a very easy role for me.
The role I also had this project was prop designer. Which was a role I struggled a bit more with. I just didn't really enjoy working in this style and I just thought it was a bit boring. I think you can also see that in the drawings themselves so I'm also just not proud of them for that reason. They work on the website, fit with the style and do their job fine, but I don't think I will want to do something like this again any time soon haha. I did really love working on the labcoat and the ID badge tho so maybe it was also just the subject about what I had to draw which had a great impact on how much I enjoyed it.
I also made some quick sketches about what kind of questions the quiz could have and what kind of images we could make as 'footage' from the dreams.
The Dreams
The dreams themselves were probably the thing we were looking most forward to making. The dreams were mostly inspired by our own dreams and nightmares so it was very fun and interesting to find out how we, but also other people's dreams looked.
For inspiration we looked for how other artists in the past tried to visualize their dreams. We wanted to have a feeling of unease in every dream. Most of our dreams and nightmares are not necessarily scary upfront, but just kind of unsettling and uncanny.
This was one of the first ideas I had. I had a very vivid dream which I storyboarded and wanted to make into a moving comic or something like that. But as we went along with the project I decided to drop this idea.
This was the second idea for a dream. I was thinking about what kind of themes my nightmares had. And some things I found interesting were my childhood, self-acceptance, religious trauma and some sexual assault things. This storyboard mainly focussed on my childhood, religious trauma and self-acceptance tho.
I often have a hard time explaining to people why religion messed me up the way it did. It was mainly the fear of someone watching me, the change of my loved ones suffering an eternity if they didn't believe (enough) in God, the shame I felt I put on my parents for not being a perfect christian and just the self hatred for not fitting in. And there also was a lot of fear of: If I do not fit in, will God still love me?
I wanted to make a stopmotion animation again because I had such a great time during the stopmotion minor. Me as a child absolutely adored making diorama's. So I made my childhood bedroom as if it was a kind of diorama. I wanted the dream to have a very childlike and innocent vibe so I used bright colors, toys, childlike drawings and lots of glitter. So when you first look at it it looks pretty fun and cute but when you look further you will probably notice that some of the child's drawings depict pretty traumatic things.
The puppet is made from pretty strong paper, iron wire and tape. I have the puppet more detail compared to the room because I wanted the puppet to stand out a bit more but I still tried to be a bit messy with the coloring and lineart for that child-made look. The face was blank on purpose because I wanted to animate it digitally (because it was faster)
The 'God' puppet was a bit more complicated to make. God-figures trough religions and times all look completely different so I kind of just made what felt right. I wanted the body to look like how the illustrations looked in my picture bibles only very realistic because I wanted the eyes to be realistic. The symbols in the design are just the symbols I saw a lot growing up so I also wanted to incorporate those. Because I wanted to make this puppet look like how the child saw God. The eyes had to be creepy but kind of beautiful at the same time. Also very piercing and uncanny. And because of the holiness I of course had to give Them a halo (which could move al the way around)
This is how the final video turned out! Warning! The video includes child abuse, religious trauma and blood
I'm really proud of how this turned out! The sounddesign was surprisingly more fun to do then I thought I would be. The song you can hear (barely) in the background I sang myself. It is a song I learned as a kid to sing when I'm scared so I thought it would be very fitting. I also did the other voice acting. I love how al of the things came together and I feel like I've learned a lot while making this project.
This is how it looked in the quiz itself and you can see what questions were combined with the video:
The last thing about this project I'm going to show you are some images I made for an other question for the quiz. The question was 'What feels most like home to you?'
These are the images I made! I tried photobashing a bit and I was afraid I wasn't going to like it but I actually really enjoyed making these! I think I nailed the vibe of it looking 'normal' at first glance but actually it being quite of putting.
This is how the question looks like in the quiz!
If you're interested in this project and want to check it out and maybe solve the story yourself, you can!
Just go to https://dreamscapeinc.eu/home.html and take a look around!
Maak jouw eigen website met JouwWeb