Memories gets older

January 2023

Technical support: Max Bolf

It is an interactive atmospheric dream walk. The individual images represent fragments  of memories of what the main character, you, was dreaming. Your goal is to remember the whole dream but the older the memories are, the harder it is to remember them and the difficulty of going through becomes more challenging. They become more abstract and more terrifying in atmosphere.

You have to get further through the memories by the mechanics of ripping out the essential parts of the memories. To do this, you are hinted at by the sections of text that are in each memories.  At the end, after the awakening, you have a space of collected fragments to construct their own catharsis of the dream. Here you will find the final message, which suggests that this nightmare was not the first but not the last one where you met the terrifying unknown.

The sense of anxiety and surveillance is heightened by the silhouette of a figure who, apart from the first shot, is present in all the memories and as the memories age, slowly moving closer.

Technique

I have chosen to tell the story through my own printed photographs, through the use of chemicals, classic tearing or crumpling, drawing, ...  I wanted to use the material as much as possible, that's also why the mechanics of tearing the paper to pass between the images. 

All the animation here is filmed frame by frame and then reworked into digital form.

Inspiration

A big inspiration for me was an experimental film technique called found footage. It was one of the avant-garde tendencies after 1945 in the US, which was about making use of existing material, that was edited and put into the context of the time. I was particularly interested in the film Decasia, directed by Bill Morrison, which shows film footage that has already been damaged by time and projects it and its defects. In this way, the director points to a kind of general transience of both film and time. In many shots the characters in the picture look as if they are fighting or running away from the destruction itself.