The Dream that was a Dream No More and Waking Life
By Kevin Lewis
Waking Life may be one of the most unique and innovative movies to emerge in recent years. For writer/director Richard Linklater it was not only a departure from his usual dramatic films but an artistic journey that answered many personal questions. Linklater, producer Tommy Pallotta and actor Speed Levitch responded with unfeigned gusto to the detailed questions put to them recently by the audience gathered for a screening and discussion of the film at the DGA Theater in New York. David Schwartz, Senior Curator of Film and Video at the American Museum of the Moving Image, moderated the discussion of the Moving Images at the DGA program.
Waking Life, made under the DGA's Low Budget Agreement, was praised at Sundance 2001 and at the New York Film Festival. Almost 60 actors were cast, including Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Steven Soderbergh, Linklater himself, and an assortment of actors who regularly appear in Linklater films. The interesting aspect is that they appear as animated figures only, but in a way far different from current animated films by Disney and Pixar.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
David Schwartz and Richard Linklater - (photo Elisa Haber)
Click picture for larger view.
|
|
|
|
|
|
What is innovative about the film is that it was shot documentary style by cinematographers Linklater and Pallotta, using Sony TRV900s and a PCI. The entire film was then overlaid with computer-painted images on G3 and G4 Macintoshes. Though it is visibly an animated film, it is, in actuality, a live-action film, using real actors and settings, which has been reinvented and transformed.
The film explores the role of dreams, philosophy and thought. The Dreamer, played by Wiley Wiggins (also an animator of the film), meets up with an Alice in Wonderland assortment of characters who debate the nature of dreams with him. The dreamer has to determine whether he will commit himself to real life or just dream.
This novel production technique gave Linklater an unusual amount of freedom. He shot the live action film digitally in Austin, New York and San Antonio over an efficient 25 days (up to 22 script pages were shot a day) using a small crew.
"We shot it like a documentary, very spontaneously," he explained. "We didn't have a visual design, outside of the transitions. It was very important how you got in and out scenes, but other than that I wanted it to look like a documentary."
If details in the live action footage were unsatisfying to him, he said that he reminded himself that he could "fix it in animation."
The animation portion took nine months to complete using more than 30 artists under the direction of Linklater and animator Bob Sabiston.
|
TIPS - Jamie Babbit: I would encourage people to get out there and do anything. I know a lot of people who are so hoity-toity about jobs that they're not willing to do. Everything is a stepping stone; everything always leads to something else. A lot of people get out of film school and tell themselves, "I want to direct." My answer is, "But you don't even know what a gaffer is! You don't even know what an electrician is. You don't know what these positions are — and then you want to supervise them?" You're not a failure if you're working as a PA. You'll learn a lot from that. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Explaining Sabiston's technique, Pallotta said, "The animators would be able to draw elements within the frame. It would be like using a brush stroke. They would draw a line and then go forward on a couple of frames and then draw the line again. What the computer does is fill in those lines and then interpolates that line. That creates a wavy effect. It's an artifact of that technique."
"More than any film I've ever done, I found it in the editing," Linklater said. "Usually, I have a tight schematic sense of the finished film. This one, I felt my way through the editing. Scenes I had pegged for the end, I moved up to the beginning. I had a lot of freedom to move things around and re-imagine the whole movie and a lot of the structure. I thought I had a structure and I did but I didn't know the exact timing of it. There was a pretty lengthy editing process."
|
