Once again, this morning the shower did its thing.
To be clear. I don’t have an agenda when I take a shower other than to take.
A shower.
Lately, though, my brain seems to wanna jump into whatever I’ve been spending time thinking about. In this case, I’d been thinking a lot about what it is that conceptually should govern the expression of an upcoming shoot. There’s a bit of branding in place… branding that, more than anything else, raises interesting possibilities.
By the time yesterday rolled around, and based on a conversation with the client, I found myself deep-diving into impressionism. I also picked up an app that removes backgrounds with a single click. It makes green-screening a not-so-crucial part of the process and turns everything I see in the world into an element of a larger, though as yet unrealized, image.
I immediately took it for a test drive, pulling the client out of an image they posted online. Then I chose a ground-level wide shot of an Instagrammed castle in which to place the client who I’d just liberated.
Since the sky in the castle painting was pretty subdued, I decided to fill it in with the sky from Van Gogh’s famous “Starry Night” painting, setting the blending mode to Screen. Now, I fully intended to mask out the bottom of the painting, but the juxtaposition of the water from “Starry Night” aligned perfectly with the field in front of the castle and the royalty painted there in the midst of afternoon strolling. So I just let everything be after a bit of tweaking.
That’s pretty much as far as I took it.
So then the next morning I’m in the shower and, with no conscious intention to do so, I start thinking about the Why of my test composition. Obviously there would be no problem capturing elements from the real world and compositing them. My main challenge at this point was Which elements to capture and What to do with them. How should those elements be arranged? Why did they belong together? And Where in any of it would there, should there, be a theme or a message or... something?
What would be the raison d’etre for the finished image? What would its reason to be…
Be?
Which is the point at which my mind starting playing around with the idea of dreams. In recent years, I’ve taken a greater interest in dreams. It’s an interest culminating in a wonderfully fun experience writing, directing, and editing the latest in the BrainWorks series appropriately titled “Sleep and the Brain”.
So three things:
1. Neuroscience literature describes dreams as a byproduct of the memory consolidation that occurs while we sleep.
2. As a practical matter, we can prime our brains to travel down specific paths and maybe even do a little work on our behalf while we’re asleep. And
3. Trauma and distressful experience endlessly unfold on their own in our dreams. Sometimes across days and weeks, even months.
Okay.
Now because the title of the project actually does, fortuitously, lean into our dream lives, naturally any given image for this client on this project could use that dream filter to express something about the content, the theme, or the inspiration behind the client’s efforts. The final image could be a lens through which lived experience is distorted in any number of ways. My personal, un-scientific explanation is that our dream state re-creates our experiences by pulling from our mental shelves anything that’ll do by way of relating the core of those experiences. It’s a very loose, interpretive mental dance. It’s diabolically metaphorical and sometimes downright incomprehensible. The final image for my client, though, would follow suit. Not to the point of incomprehensibility, but surely into the realm of metaphor and allegory. Definitely evoking Freud’s and Jung’s view of our dream states where nothing is what it is. Where one thing can mean something that it’s physically not. This final image would either re-express a story and/or lay bare the foundations and inspirations of the work it represents.
A collage is what came to my mind just then. At which point I saw in my mind a collage of images ripped from different magazines and newspapers, their ragged edges fully visible. Or maybe they wouldn’t be visible. Maybe it would be strips of individual elements set together by a shiny glaze. Either way, I was down for this. Because we live in a time of perpetual Easter egg hunting. A relentless pursuit of clues buried in a film or tv series. Sometimes buried deep. Sometimes right there in plain sight. Once found, the search for meaning begins. And then the aggressive contemplation of what’s to come next.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Seriously. Good ideas have this kind of shelf life. Call it what you will… but I call that a fully engaged audience. And I dig that.
Finally—in the last minute of my shower, by the way—I received the understanding that the image comes first. Once that’s complete, then comes the element of the client themselves by way of a discerning process. What's their relation to the composite image? What's their experience in that dreamscape trapped in amber? What are they feeling? What are they doing? Are they close to us or far away? Are we looking over their shoulder, catching the side of their face? Are we standing behind them? Are they in the middle of some physical action? If so, Why? If not, Why not?
And so on.
From dreams to collages to metaphors to meaning and What Comes Next. All of it. In the shower.
Dang.
Any more of this, I’m gonna have to start claiming the shower as part of my official office space.
;-)
