What Dreams May Come: imagining a painted world through vfx
"Ward's 'What Dreams May Come,' starring Robin Williams was nominated for production design in addition to winning an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. The film, tells an epic love story of soul mates separated by death. The story would inspire Ward to envision the afterlife as a painted world, incorporating state-of-the-art, adapted, and entirely new visual effects technologies in an original, fully articulated, filmic view of imagined realms that may await us after death."
(Saville Productions)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
In-Transit: The Devil's Mode
The character, Mr. Paxton in Anthony Burgess' novel The Devil's Mode has thrown away his passport after entering the nowhere of departure lounges and planes, filled his pockets with air tickets and is determined to spend the rest of his life in the nowhere and comfortable emptiness of planes and airports is, of course, a rather unusual personage -(Burgess, 1989)."God almighty," I said. What he showed me was a large yellow plastic folder crammed with air tickets. He said, riffling through them: "Going everywhere. Rio de Janeiro, Valparaiso, wherever that is, Mozambique, Sydney, Christchurch, Honolulu, Moscow. "If there's one place where you'll need a visa, it's certainly Moscow," I said. "But, damn it, how do you propose to go anywhere without a passport?" There's going and going," he said. "When I get to one place then I start off right away for another. Well, in some cases not right away. There's a fair amount of waiting in some of the places. But they have what they call transit lounges. Get a wash and a brush-up. Perhaps a bath. Throw a dirty shirt away and buy a new one. Ditto for socks and underpants. No trouble, really. "In effect," I said, astonished, "you'll be travelling without arriving. "You could put it that way." -(Burgess, 1989: 141).Burgess' character provides a clear demonstration of the cultural emptiness entailed in this peculiar expression of modernity. An uprooted man who had lost everything that connected him to the thick, rich meaning-contexts of ordinary life (he was retired, a widower, and his children had left home), he was intent on ending his days in the nowhere of air travel.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
