BVA203 S1W2 : Speech and Proposal Presentation

Speech Script:

The inspiration for my work, influences on it and the practitioners that I am looking at all overlap, as such I have chosen not to break these into separate categories, but instead combine and explain them all concurrently. My question is "Can I use narrative structure and storytelling techniques to make the audience experience the sensation of remembering a dream?". I chose this question because of a combination of three interests that I have.


The first is lucid dreaming and how one's subconscious state functions, essentially how dreams work. This is a recent interest that I have developed and upon doing research into the subject I found myself developing an idea to explore with my film work. Christopher Nolan is an artist model that I'm looking at specifically for his work in Inception and Memento, both of which dive into the psyche of its protagonists.


Inception for it's exploration into how dreams work – a lot of what is depicted in that film correlates directly to the limited amount of reading that I have done myself. Memento because of the second reason that I wanted to explore this idea : creative narrative structure, specifically telling a story in reverse. I have always considered Memento to be the only film that could actually work with its story unfolding in reverse, I thought about whether or not something fresh can be done with this technique, which leads to my third inspiration: there is a trope in short films that the protagonist always wake up at the beginning of the story, this is a slow device that has become looked down upon because of how generic and uninteresting of a starting point this is. A trope that I also wondered about how it could be made fresh. Combining reverse structure and the beginning of the film being a character waking up creates an obviously interesting premise (at least I think so).


Watchmen has a great issue where one of the characters reflects on his life, but as a being who experiences all time at once the structure of how it is told changes as well, flitting from present, past and future, like a montage on the page. I can use this as a model because of its playful use of structure in order to put the audience in the head-space of the character. This is called subjective storytelling, something that is a cornerstone of my idea, I want the audience to experience what the character does. A good example of this in film is A Beautiful Mind. My proposal is to research ways to achieve this effect and have the audience feel like the character, who in this case has just woken from a dream and is remembering it. I also threw in some examples of dreamlike atmospheres created in films, which I could use as a technical guide (these being David Lynch’s work like in Rabbits or Twin Peaks, which is very surrealistic, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film which also plays out in the character’s head and has very creative ways of presenting that.)


So the premise plainly is that a man wakes up from a dream at the start of the film and remembers it, this is where we tell the story in reverse. When we remember dreams we can never recall the beginning of it, always what happened last. In this way we lead from one event back to the next as we remember how we got there and what happened before hand. The dream comes back slowly and yet your brain also very quickly forgets it. I want to represent this by making things become less tangible and more surreal as the film progresses, this not only acts as a type of rising action but also reflects how quickly we forget dreams.


I want the fact that the story is being told in reverse to be a reveal, most likely in the third act. The start of the film will play out as a mystery or something of that sort. My intention is to create the real feeling in the audience of remembering a dream upon waking, I find when I do try and remember a dream I often start filling blanks naturally, creating narratives that never existed. By showing the audience two and two I hope to make them come to a conclusion that really was never there. Of course dreams are our subconscious processing what happens in our lives, whatever the actual content of the film will be, will be representative of the main characters fears and anxieties.


I don't know if any of this will work the way I have it laid out in my mind, and there is a great uncertainty with how to execute this exactly, but that's why it’s a question that I wish to research.

Presentation Slides:

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I think the presentation went well, it was quick and concise and the only thing I worried about (that I'd be incapable of getting my idea across to everyone) wasn't a problem at all since the class seemed to understand what I was going.

I didn't do much of the speech I wrote, and covered more generally, but I feel that the way I explained it was good enough considering the situation.