I have come up with the theme for my cinemagraph: daydreaming. Daydreaming is something prominent in my life; i find myself doing it whenever i’m bored, or when not much is going on. I want to create a cinemagraph that will allow others to see the kinds of things i daydream about.

As i said previously, I would like my cinemagraph to be comedic and a little parody looking. I came up with an idea that would reflect this well; it starts with me doing some homework, visibly bored, and then cuts to me having a fight with a mysterious figure; just at the climax of the fight, it will cut back to me, still in my room doing the homework. The locations i’ll use will be my bedroom and my garden.

I want the daydreaming segment of the short to look different from the more normal parts; daydreams aren’t exact reflections of reality, and i want to capture this in my cinemagraph.

To help generate ideas of how I can separate reality from daydreaming visually, i first looked at ways that artists have interpreted dreams visually in other forms of media;

In this music video, the saturation has been turned up a lot to give off an unrealistic and dreamy vibe; the music video is supposed to look like a dream, which is achieved through an extremely exaggerated use of effects. This music video looks very blue to me; it’s possible that some colour grading was used to further push the ‘dream’ aesthetic.

I think something like this contrasted with more naturally lit and coloured scenes would give a distinctive visual difference between what is reality and what is a daydream. I like the idea of saturating the colours a lot, but i don’t think a more blue/mystical colour palette would fit the atmosphere of my own cinemagraph that much. I think what would work better is exaggerating the colours a lot to make them all look very bright and bold.

By googling ‘daydream photography’, I was able to find this picture. In this picture, i think the camera angle helps to give off a slightly distorted and unrealistic reflection of the landscape; because of the low camera angle, the sky and floor look quite close together, making the whole landscape look smaller. I think this is interesting, as it’s subtle but effective, like a lot of Svajger’s details in her work. I think a combination of abstract camera angles and saturated colours would be effective in separating daydreaming from reality in my piece.

The last art piece i looked at was this photograph. I think the use of props is very effective here; the props, suspended in action, give off a kind of magical and unreal vibe, making the photo feel fun and unconventional. I think a concept like this would work well with cinemagraphs; you could make the props move subtly, which would look really cool. I’ll look into using some props for the daydream sequence of my cinemagraph.

With some influences taken note of, i decided to make a quick moodboard so that i had a clear idea of the kind of aesthetic I was going to go for in my piece. I tried to collect a range of images with interesting colours, poses and shots; as well as images that I thought gave off the vibe I was going for well.

This moodboard gave me ideas for aesthetics, poses and camera angles; I want the colours of my piece to be very bold and bright, and i want to use a range of camera angles to make the shots look interesting and slightly exaggerated. I also want to use some silly and over the top facial expressions and poses in my cinemagraph, to add to the comedic vibe.

With my ideas down, I needed to star planning and putting together the ideas for my shots. I started off by taking a few pictures for experimentation;

Next, I wanted to play around with camera angles;

I created a rough storyboard, depicting what will happen in each shot. I didn’t want to polish this storyboard too much; there are some things I’ll probably want to change and play around with during the production of this cinemagraph, so I wanted a rough idea of what happens in each frame for pacing rather than detailed drawings.

The storyboard details what happens in each shot of my cinemagraph; i start off doing work in my room, then i start daydreaming about me fighting a random opponent (which will be my brother, in a mask) and just as we’re about to hit each other, it cuts back to me in my room.

I plan on using a still image for the first frame and a short video for the last. The 2nd and 3rd frames could work with either being still images or cinemagraphs, so I’ll do what time allows me to. All of the daydream sequences will definitely be cinemagraphs, so i’ll prioritise them.

Sound wise, I want to add some music for the daydream scenes, so that they contrast the silent real life scenes in more ways than just visually.

The last thing i did was some observational drawings, as they were included in the required weekly tasks. To be honest I don’t know how to link these to cinemagraphs, but observational drawings are always good practice, so i think it was a helpful task.