Shooting Dream Scenes
 

I’m going filming a Dream scene for my graduation film and was wondering if anybody had some good ideas on how to do it. The scene will be at night and day and there not nightmares, there happy dreams.

My first impression ideas would be using a pro mist filter with some eerie music plus some disorientation with the camera work, anyway these techniques seem a bit clichéd, so I thought if anyone used a technique before and it worked, let me know

Shooting on DV with HD100

Thanks

Cliched techniques are not necessarily bad for something like this. If everyone is used to seeing a dream sequence in a certain way, then doing it that way will tell their brain "dream sequence" without you having to introduce anything like a talking goldfish to de-reality it.

Really slow shutter speeds can bring a sense of temporal displacement to a shot. They get that sort of 'blurred motion' effect to them. AND it's something you can do without a lot of setup.

I would personally film all of the shots in slow motion and without any filter then in post do some visual effects on them. The visual effect I would probably do is to take whatever footage you want to use and import it into something like After Effects and duplicate the layer so that you have 2 layers of the same video on top of each other. Then desaturate the top layer and apply a Gaussian to it. Then change the layer properties to screen. On the bottom layer take some of the color out and maybe add some kind of distortion, like a ripple, but make sure its very subtle. That combined with the slow motion will create a dreamy feel.

Film them normally. Dreams don't look different when you're in them - I don't recall my dreams having a soft diffusion filter or a slow shutterspeed (though I have a friend who claims his dreams have fade outs and jump cuts). It's the events that happen that make the experience "dream like".

If you want the sequences to look like film dream sequences (or more precisely student film dream sequences) then yes, throw in all those filters and cliches you can think of.

An interesting approach in The Sopranos where the show is generally shot with a shallow Depth of Field, longer lenses and diffuse lighting, for they shot a long dream sequence with wide angle lenses, harder lighting and deep Depth of Field. Really it was the action that made it truly surreal and dreamlike.