Dream bubble梦如泡影

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Being a “participant” to see the VR animated trilogy: Gloomy eyes (I)

After seeing episode 1 at Venice film festival and episode 2 at Sandbox Immersive Festival, I finally purchased the whole piece (35 minutes) on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1111620/Gloomy_Eyes/ and managed to see episode 3.

Firstly I'm surprised that the voice-over plays a less important role compared to how it was used in previous VR works. The image in front of me can tell 70% of the story itself meanwhile the voice-over covers the rest as adding more details. The audience doesn't have to rely on understanding the voice-over for understanding the whole story. Thanks to the budget over 1.1 million dollars, the creator could make such a complicated and detailed piece come true.

The way that Gloomy eyes adapts the language of traditional cinema is also interesting. Unlike Dear Angelica and Battlescar which use different sizes of the characters (compared to their environment and the audience) to indicate the field sizes (from wide shot to extreme close-up), distance is mostly used in Gloomy eyes.

What the audience's eyes (regarded as the camera) initially see is around medium shot and medium close-up, when they move their heads, they can see the camera movements by themselves: pan, tilt, zoom...... (I like zooming in for close-ups a lot.) When the scene is further, it gives the audience the feeling of a wide shot. 

At this moment I don't really move because it needs time to receive all the information of the characters and their environment as a whole picture. (I think it's also an indication from the creator: this scene I recommend you seeing from this distance.)  Also the story happens around the audience in 360 degrees, so his eyes need to move horizontally (and arcuately, to be precise) everytime there is a "transition". For example, in episode 3, from the scene Gloomy was buried again to the scene Nina cries alone by the cliff, the audience needs to keep turning to the right 180 degrees -- very much alike the running film inside the projector, which is hard to experience watching a flat movie.

Speaking of transition, a VR animation is quite similar to a theatre play: there is no transition if the scene doesn't change. While it doesn't mean that the audience has to watch a "sequence shot" in a "still angle": he moves as the "camera" moves (the “camera” moves as he moves). If his eyes moves back and forth between two characters, he is cross cutting. When the VR animation is rendering in real-time, the audience is editing in real-time, too. If he watches twice, there will be two different editings. If in the second time he decides to pay attention to the parts that he missed in the first time, his two versions could be totally different as from Béla Tarr to Quentin Tarantino. 

It reminds me of The horrifically real virtuality, selected in Venice film festival 2018, the main character the vampire pointed one of the audience to be the cameraman, what he asked for could be different each time when there was a different person, meanwhile the audience could choose to obey or not. It reveals the truth to us that everything VR is real-time. (There was a real actor behind The horrifically real virtuality, so both the reality and the virtual reality were real-time.) In other VR pieces where there is no "vampire", we need to take the hint from the creator that we are the "participants" rather than the "spectators" and our perspective decides the "final cut of the film".

(The idea of participants / spectators quoted from “In the Blink of an Eye” by Walter Murch.)

Find the Chinese translation here: https://movie.douban.com/review/13221699/

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Thoughts of the day: Frame

When we talk about meditation, we know how important that (temporarily) forgetting your self conscious is. I find it very similar to the way we forget the “frame” when we read a book or watch a movie. That is to say, if you are always realizing that “I’m reading this book” “I’m watching this movie”, it will be hard to really enter the story of that book or that movie. The only way to enter is to believe that you are living in the story, instinctively.

Speaking of VR films and games, they don’t have a frame at the first place. But their audiences are not exempted from noticing the frame psychologically. (Sometimes not having a frame instead emphasizes its existance.) To some extent, to be immersed and to be in the flow, we are always fighting against this kind of “frame”.

(Photo credit: Still of “Here”, the VR piece directed by Lysander Ashton.)

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Dream bubble 0925

Last night in my dream, I went to the house of a friend’s parents which he only describes it to me in reality.

His parents were not at home. There were only his girlfriend (which was not the real one) and his brother. Even though I “was” there but they couldn’t see me as if I was a ghost. It was the first time I was totally transparent in my dream which was very weird and a bit sad but at the same time quite fun.

The house of my friend’s parents was a quite a big one in the suburb of a town in Taiwan. It was a 4-floor one with a garage at the ground floor. First I entered, I saw my friend busy cooking with his girlfriend and his brother in the kitchen. (As a big house, the first thing that you could see is a kitchen is a little bizzare for me.) Turning left, there was the dinning room with a huge dining table. Because my friend has 3 siblings, I can imagine every meal they have must be a living one. The kitchen and the dinning room were bright and modern which were different from the other traditional Chinese parts. I thought his family had been living there for quite a long time so they upgraded these 2 frequently used parts.

Behind the dinning room was the garage, which was extremly weird. Imagine you park your car and go directly for dinner without opening any door. No wonder it was a house in dream, anything unreasonable was acceptable.

When they were preparing the dinner, none of them could see me. While the dream was cut to another sequence (like a movie) that my friend showed me around the house. The only thing I can still remember is the staircase, which was made of stone and wood and the walls were decorated by paintings and posters by my friend and his siblings. They even painted directly on the wall, I can remember there was some black handwritten Chinese characters under the window of his sister’s room. The window was on the wall of the staircase, in other words, it was an interior window. I think it’s either very strange or only for huge houses.

Apart from the kitchen and the dinning room, the house was older than I expected. I couldn’t recall how the dream ended and what they did about the dinner. I’m not even sure that I was still a ghost or a guest at the end.

I adimit that I do think of this friend a lot recently (that’s why no surprise I dreamt about him finally). I said something that irritated him so he refused to talk back to me anymore. It was about the situation in Hong Kong and Taiwan (sadly it seems not a single Chinese living abroad can avoid discussing it). I don’t regret that I told him my real opinion which he couldn’t accept. However, it is also very sad that politics seperates friends from different parts of the world with different opinions. If I had another chance, I would not say it so directly but I do question if it would only prolong our firendship which would still have an end.

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Dream pieces

We are having the same dream 

By holding each a different piece of the dream

If one wants to know the entire picture

Every human being should share his piece

However

Some foget it

Some ignore it

Some distort it

What we can see is just part of the dream

Which may be the opposite side of the real one 

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Dream bubble 0826

  It’s been a long time that I haven’t written anything about my dream. I did dream and actually a lot recently, some of my dreams were interesting but horrible too. It took me a while to recover (yes I have excellent memory on dreams), so I didn’t have the time to write it down.

  In the early morning, I dreamt about having myself on a raft landing on a small island’s shore in a sunny day, around there was only light blue ocean. I didn’t know neither where I was nor where I came from. I had several fellows with me who were busy working, one of them caught seafood which soon filled the whole deck. I guess we were somewhere very far from the continent because those seafood was clean, colorful and way much bigger. The crab claw was even bigger than my palm. We had to eat it raw but we felt we were eating sashimi because of the top quality. We were accidentally stuck in nowhere but fortunately, we had nice weather and tasty food.

   When my fellows were still eating, I found a yacht quite close to ours. It was a modern one with a streamline design and electronic display on the black surface. I curiosly walked in and found a huge monitor for desktop on the deck. There was a movie playing (couldn’t remember the name of it!!!) which the image was about prisoners (wearing orange jumpsuits) roaming around a room (which seemed like their canteen). I clicked the playing history and realized the movie was played over 3000 times in a couple of years because it was the only movie could be played in the computer.

  I understood that we might be stuck forever, since these people in a more advanced boat couldn’t escape either. What a torture to watch a movie for 3000 times!

(Analysis: I think I’ve just watched too much news about Hong Kong the last few days, feeling so sorry for the innocent people who got hurt and being too angry about the so-called protestors. My dream is just a reflection of my emotion. I have to say I was very upset and even depressed. Hope the darkness will flee away and everything gets better soon.)

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Dream bubble 0415

I’m very sick after the trip from Copenhagen.

I was sleeping this afternoon because of an intensive stomach. In my dream, I woke up in my Mother’s bedroom, had my face swollen and my eyes could hardly open. I also had a headache. The room was very hot and dry that I could hardly breathe.

I went out of the bedroom and I found out the living room was reconstructed to a cafe. The wall was dark red. The empty corner was filled with tables and chairs. There was even a half layer added between the living room and its ceiling (which would be impossible in reality because the ceiling of my mother’s apartment is less than 3 meters.) I took a peek at the stairs and I saw more tables and chairs upstairs.

But it seemed very normal in this dream world that a lot of people would use a part of their apartment as a public area because they didn’t want to “leave it empty”.

In the cafe, my grandpa was having a meeting with 3 white people. He asked if I felt better and he went back to their conversation. (Later I found a brown blanket that I used in my childhood was on my bed. My grandpa cared about me but he didn’t understand what I really needed was cooling down. It seemed weird, because he is a doctor in reality.)

Then I check my phone and I found out a classmate in university updated her status, asking if she and her husband should accept the offer to work in Rotterdam. The conditions were adorable but she worried a lot about language. She even post that she didn’t understand why they were given this offer because their job had nothing to do to work abroad and they were not the best choice.

I was still very sick, I would say 10 times of the status in reality. I could hardly see and breathe. The apartment was a high temperature prison to me. I wanted to get out and recover. At this moment, I woke up.

Waking up again blurred my cognition of reality and dream. (So what Christopher Nolan described in his “Inception” was damn true: dreams do have layers.) My brain knows my sickness and it cheated with it. While I don’t know why my brain imprisoned my awareness in that dark red room, it was really horrible.

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Dream bubble 0329

I was on a peak with 2 people: one was a scientist, the other was a friend (but I couldn't tell who he was in reality.)

The scientist invited us to test his latest invention, a white plastic rocky thing. He told us that this rocky could float in the air and take us down to the foot of the peak. It could highly prolong the time period of falling down. So I wondered it succeeded in fighting against gravity?

Then I got on it, found it not big enough to feel safe: if I kept my legs around it, there would be no space for my arms; if I held it by my arms, my legs would be totally outside. While the scientist said the latter was the right way to ride: “Try your best to hold it tight.” He even had my hands cuffed around the rocky.

I really doubted if it was safe enough but I didn’t have time to react: once I got cuffed, the rocky started falling. The scientist was right, the falling was really slow, I had enough time to appreciate the view of the sky and of the earth. My friend rode on another rocky right behind me and I could tell he was as amazed as I was.

Luckily we both landed safe and sound. During the whole process, I was thinking how the rocky could make it, was the scientist the first person who figured out the mystery of gravity? And why one person falling from the peak would be quick but with the rocky (which means more weight) turned out to be slow? Was it already against the principles of physics?

At this moment of questioning everything in my dream, I woke up.

(I’m still questioning: if the irrationality of dreams can wake us up, then where will the irrationality of reality lead our consciousness to? In other words, will we be able to “wake up” in another world from the reality?)

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Dream bubble 0327

No.1

I was walking on a country road with my “Opening ceremony” dress on, (exactly like the last scene in “Force Majeure” by Ruben Östlund, where the wife was too frightened to stay in the bus to the foot of the mountain and fled to the country road, but in a summer version,) at the moment I was trying to figure out if I was wearing high heels, (Is it weird? If it was in reality why I needed to “figure out”? If I knew it was in dream, why I didn’t notice?) Nicole Kidman, well-dressed in a golden skirt and had her hair tied up in a ponytail, approached and talked to me very kindly as if we were colleagues.

Then I understood that we were on the road to a red carpet, highly likely in Cannes. (Anyway in real Cannes they offer limos to stars, of course!) I did feel that I was trying very hard to butter Nicole Kidman up because I wanted to show that I had a super star friend. Still, even in this crazy dream, I was very surprised that Nicole Kidman would take the initiative to talk to me, so I couldn’t let her down, I had to show my best hospitality, at all cost!!!

No.2

I was preparing for a very important event. (I guess it was a pitching session, because I really did one in reality 2 weeks ago.) Basically we --- me and some other participants, just needed to recite a few paragraphs on a paper to the professionals under the stage. (So it was not really pitching.)

In the dream, I had been practicing hundreds of times so I was very confident. However, when it was my turn, the professionals corrected me that I had to recite the whole thing, not a few paragraphs.They could only give me 10 more minutes, which was the time period of the person after me on the stage. I was still confident about my memory ability, I memorized everything in 1 minute. Nothing in the dream could beat me up. I wish I knew what happened next, but I just woke up.

No.3

In a dark room only lit by a small lamp, I was lying on the bed with a naked brown figure (exactly like the figures on the painting “Dance” by Herni Matisse). Even though he was muscled, he was dexterous. Jumping from the window to the bed, from the bed to the desk, he was talking to me all the time. Most of the time, he was in backlighting, so his silhouette was golden.

No.4

I was in a small ancient town in Southeast China. The road was so narrow that the whole town was like a maze, I lost myself a couple times. I guess I was stalking someone. Pretty shady. Finally, I found her at the edge of the town, inside a student dormitory room. Sitting on the upper one of a bunk bed, she was talking to someone in poor English on the phone, saying something like “They are Chinese”. She was a tourist in this town and for her, it was traveling abroad. There were at least 3 people around her, one doing her hair, one doing her make up and the third taking her stuff out of the suitcase. She was served as a princess while in a very poor room.

I think I was stalking her because I was dying to see her face. Unfortunately something in front of her on the bed covered it. I slipped away before she noticed a stranger was in her room. But more or less, she felt something wrong. Despicable me!!!

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Le voyage dans la lune (A trip to the moon) by Georges Méliès in the exhibition “Hors piste, 14e edition”, Pompidou center.

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Me painted by Geometrize. Sweet.

Try it yourself: http://www.samcodes.co.uk/project/geometrize-haxe-web/

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  DAU, which sounds exactly as “arrived” (Dao 到) in Chinese Mandarin, has arrived in Paris yesterday — while at least it was supposed to. It’s a cinematic art project, also an immersive installation about the life of Soviet scientist and Nobel Prize winner Lev Landau.

  Spending over a decade to develop and realize the original idea which firstly appeared in the director’s head in 2006, DAU was supposed to have its premiere at Berlin last October, but the application was refused by the police authorities because of security concerns. Last night, when I came with a friend of mine with our “visa”, the tickets to the show, in front of Théâtre de la Ville, we were told to come back another day, by the same reason in Berlin: prefecture de police of Paris turned down the show. (While at noon they sent us emails saying that visitors who booked to enter the show at 12h and 15h would have to postpone their visit to 18h. In general, we saved almost a whole day for the show but in the end saw nothing.)

  The only thing available last night was the tiny part in Pompidou center, the apartment-like cage where 2 actors having their dinner inside. As your can see in the video, we visitors were like invisible peepers standing closely to one another outside the cage, barely can hear a word from the actors.

  This reminds me of Spike Jonez’s “Being John Malkovich”.

  Standing in the dark, watching 2 strangers doing something unpredictable, I felt myself being like John Cusack inside John Malkovich’s head for the first time, creepy and curious. What happened in front of us was real, but nothing to do with us, so close and so isolated as well, like Malkovich’s body with the Cusack’s soul. For the first time, I sensed myself being just part of a body, very tiny and very replicable. (I also thought about the meerkats in Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi”, the animal gathers in thousands on the floating island, mysteriously quiet but somehow concentrated on something unrevealed.)

  The behavior of the audience was more interesting than the performance, although it was the performance which made us act like that. We were standing still, being silent and emotionless, even holding our breath — wasn’t it monumental, like the Moai on Easter Island? Our stare was eternal, because the question we asked remained unanswered.

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Dream bubble 0125

 My dream last night was a masterpiece.

 At the beginning, I was kind of being a new member in a mafia family. (I think I dated one of the sons of the boss.) Soon, they told me there was gonna be a fight between them and their deadly enemy, because of me?

 We were all waiting silently in the living room, the ground floor of a villa, for the final fight. The boss insisted that we should be very silent else the enemy could take control of the timing, which was the key to win the fight. Unfortunately, another son of him, who was considered as the most clumsy one, spread the pistachios all over the floor once he torn open the snack’s bag.

 The enemy heard it and broke in. I think, most of us, immediately jumped into the river behind the villa, but only three of us survived and got out of it, at somewhere else in the city.

 As soon as we could breath again, a woman worked for our enemy appeared not far away on the street. Then we had to hide behind a building, hung ourselves on the burglary-resisting bars outside the windows. Still, the other two of my fellows thought we had exposed ourselves, so they chose to get closer to the enemy woman and gave her a box of chocolate as a bribe.

 At the moment I thought we would get killed, the woman told us that she would have killed us if she wanted, but she would let us go because she still loved Ah-Shing, the oldest son of our boss.

 “Please tell Ah-Shing, I’ll always be there for him even though it’s already impossible for us to be together.” She had long straight black hair, thick red lips and she wore a deep V neck red dress. In the end, she wet her eyes.

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Dream bubble 0117

“Give her some bitcoins to eat.” I heard a guy saying this in a dinner party.

“Isn’t bitcoin money? Why they eat money?” I asked a friend who sat beside me.

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Dream bubble 0116

   One morning, I was going to travel with my cousin. We just packed our luggage a few hours before leaving home and every minute I realized that I had forgotten something else. It was a disaster. Our train would be at 09:51 but we were already 09:49 at home.

 “It doesn’t matter. We can explain to the train company and they can let us get on the next one.” My cousin seemed very relaxed about being late. I wondered if we could really do that but it was the only hope for us.

 “Take your time. Double check your stuff. Don’t forget anything important. It’s worse to find out anything missing during your trip.” My mother was there too.

 Nobody was angry. It was still the best I could imagine.

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Dream bubble 0113

  I was making fiims in a Las Vegas-like city where people either gamble or shoot. I was shooting a short film there and like other young directors, I wanted to do something additional in weekends to support my life.

 I walked into a casino and I met this girl, Chenlu, who I worked with in China in real life. She was basically gambling and eating, but she told me she was doing her job. She explained that it was a part-time job that a lot of people in this city would do, they just simply circle the numbers on a piece of betting card (very much like a Lotto card) and hand it in to the manager. Once they hand in one card, they can choose a dish on the sushi train in front of them. (Yes, it’s a casino with sushi trains, how amazing.)

 “Then you won’t pay any penny for your food in weekends.” Chenlu said, “That’s how regular people live here.”

 I asked her what would happen about the numbers, if it mattered that I didn’t circle the right ones. “Not at all if you choose the wrong ones, but you won’t get the money if you choose the right ones, it will be the casino’s.” Chenlu finished her last card and chose roast duck with rice.

 I was walking on the street and I heard three of my colleagues calling my name under a bridge. I tried to get downstairs but the stairs were made of glass. I had to be very careful not to break them. I felt it too risky so I told them not to wait for me. After a long time, I suddenly found one that was made of cement. (Apparently it was a huge bridge.) I got down and I met three of them at a bus stop beneath.

 “We are waiting for you. Come with us to Gu’s place beside Disneyland.” Gu is a friend of my friend that I just met once in real life. She is a lawyer. “How come such a business woman live beside Disneyland?” I was very confused but I did appreciate their hospitality. Actually I was very happy. So I joined them. Sunshine spread on us, just like the one I saw in Le Havre (a city in Normandy, France) couple years ago.

 My life in the imaginary Las Vegas was not that bad, wasn’t it?