One Astonishing Film

One topic that Damien brought up in class that I found particularly captivating was the idea that new media is a modulation of our concept of time and space. I feel that a medium’s ability to alter one’s perception of time certainly attracts us to experience it. The movie we enjoyed on Thursday, the Waking Life, certainly captures this concept and I believe the animators of the picture did an incredible job of morphing the audience’s concept of time. I looked into the filmmaking process and discovered that they used a method called rotoscoping, in which live action frames were traced over with lines and color which mimics the real-life movements of the characters and their surroundings. This experimental method certainly accentuated the artist’s intentions of creating a lucid- dreamlike state for the viewers and the film’s characters. Through adept sound manipulation and incredible special effects, the film sucked me into the dreamscape and slowed my perception of time to where I was left in complete relaxation and awe.

The film also succeeded in allowing me to experience the beauty of the present and an altered state of consciousness, by presenting surreal characters with extremely exaggerated features in constant motion; expressions which seemed to echo the philosophical concepts they discussed (a form of metalogue). Simply looking into the artistic contents of the film is fascinating, but diving into meanings behind the intellectual conversations between characters is seperate story that I’ll save for another day. But one thing is for sure, the Waking Life is an astoundingly progressive film that should pave the way for a future of animative filmmaking that I would love to be a part of.