Creators’ Reflections

“I decided not to overthink this one and first added Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, even though it’s perhaps an obvious choice. It’s my favorite movie, so I couldn’t resist. Since the first clip I decided to add was Joel hooked up to the forgetting machine, I decided to find clips of characters in other films about dreams waking up or falling asleep attached to machines that track, save, or exploit dreams.” (Stephanie Brown)

“A very intriguing task – I could see different thematic ideas in each preceding 30 seconds clip, which I followed.” (Kirsten Adkins)

“I very much enjoyed participating in this process. I hadn’t given it any thought before it was my turn to input my 30 seconds, and only once I’d downloaded the clip and opened up Premiere Pro did I first think about what clips I might use, having seen what went before. I very much went with my instinct. The first clip I thought about was Wild Strawberries. I was shown the dream sequence from this as an UG student 10+ years ago and it’s always stuck with me. I only got round to watch the entire film a few years back – and I hadn’t realised the film started with the dream sequence – how bold. This led me to think about what other dream sequences I would have enjoyed from films in that era, and straight away Big Lebowski came to mind. I haven’t seen it for 5 or so years, but it (I’m sure) remains one of the most remarked upon dream sequences of Hollywood cinema in the past 30 years. So, both clips were really a little… clichéd, or I didn’t put much thought into them. Initially I thought I’d use more clips – but again I had no idea what they’d be. But I got these two into the editing software and just found that they spoke to each other really nicely. WS with its high modernist seriousness and BL with its very postmodern unseriousness – though with a nice Hitchcock/Bunuel note of existential dread at its end. So I ended up editing them as if they were shot/reverse shot. This meant flipping vertically the first couple of BL clips to make a fairly farcical attempt at an eye-line-match cut. Otherwise I changed all the BL clips to B+W and reversed and sped up the clip of Bridges’ stupified walking, purely because I thought it funny. As this was (potentially) the final clip of the video I then added a freeze frame and iris effect to Sjostrom’s character. Just felt like a nice closing. On the whole the process took me around an hour, and I really enjoyed the collaborative yet anonymous nature of it (I have no idea who they other collaborators are – though I suppose I could’ve found out).” (Robert Munro)