Arts University Bournemouth has provided £900 of match funding
Lullaby for the Lost
Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom
Aim: A sleeping man’s fading memory of his late Mother unravels through a recurring dream that reverberates and transforms throughout his life
'Lullaby For The Lost' is an Experimental Short Film that aims to explore the phenomenological duality of human experience, unravelling the intertwined relationship between our external reality of conscious waking life and our internal reality of the unconscious dream-state.
Throughout our lives, our experiences and memories dissolve into the abstract boundaries of dreams. As our external reality shifts over time, our internal perception of memory transforms within the dream-state, entirely re-contextualising our experiences across the course of our lives.
We wish to trace this experiential continuity between internal and external realities throughout a singular life’s timeline, exploring their causal influence and resonant effect upon one another, from birth to death. We will explore this through the metamorphosis of a singular memory, transforming across different iterations of a recurring dream throughout an individual’s life.
Our film explores a sleeping man’s fading memory of his Mother, as it unravels through a recurring, hypermnesic dream that reverberates and transforms throughout his life, tracing from his final dream back to his first. He lays suspended in a dormant lullaby across different stages of his life, longing to reconnect with his late Mother and the warm comfort of his childhood.
In dreams lie our memories. Distant echoes drifting in time. We return to our nostalgic lullabies in a cycle of vague remembrance. Suspended between waking life and death. Longing to find ourselves in the darkness…we remain lost.
To engulf the audience in the feeling of living this life, and dying this death, and searching the emptiness for an end to its depth, we intend to focus on the abstract symbolism and emotional responses elicited from sources seemingly lacking clear meaning, or plot, which are connected nonetheless, whether they’re remembered or not. Through a unification of departments, we hope to craft a visceral cinematic experience, creating the uneasy nostalgia of drifting through the people you’ve been and don’t know anymore, to find yourself a person you once looked up to or down upon, and ultimately something beyond our expression, clinging to those closest to you.
The sensory experience will be fragmented to hint at the frustrating fluidity of dreams and memories; as we reach for pieces of reality we can’t see anymore, but know occupy a space in our world, or latch onto distinctly recognisable pieces, until they become exaggerated to the point of significant difference. We plan on producing this experience through analogue means as much as we can, to highlight the uncertain materiality of existence, so will be shooting on 16mm film, incorporating the spontaneity of light leaks, development, and film exposure, and embracing the entire process as a more succinct reflection of the film's essence than solely digital.
Through a carefully constructed growing and deteriorating soundscape, alongside a recurring lullaby shifting stylistically at different points in the man’s life, a constant yearning will be present underneath the uncertain visuals. To illustrate the crushing duality of reality, in our conscious and unconscious interaction with it, the film will be divided into a Split-Screen which extends to the auditory experience, displaying internal and external reality as two separate yet subtly inseparable frames of existence – a narrative barely held together by the edit.
External reality will be framed as a constant omniscient view, simply existence as it is, detached from perspective, exorcised from human emotion and morality, mercilessly loving sublime mundanity. An unwavering presence despite impermanence. Therefore, the set design, lighting, and camera, will be minimalist and naturally motivated, yet heightened to accentuate the mystical beauty of being in any form at all. Internal reality will draw more attention to its instability, with fluctuating set sizes portraying aging perspective, roaming camera movement suggesting a subjective view, practical lens distortion disrupting that view, overlaying imagery clouding any certainty of people, places, or objects, and colour liberating itself as light motivates its own direction.
'Lullaby for the Lost' is a film about yearning for a time and place gone by: feeling lost and longing for a sense of belonging once more. Nostalgia is a strong feeling: we all experience moments from our past that we can reluctantly only revisit through fleeting memories, which continuously reconstruct themselves throughout the course of our lives. This film employs dreams as a stage for those memories to be reformed: suspended between life and death, we are confronted with the depths of our unconscious being, helplessly watching as our dreams unravel our fears, grief, and trauma.
The main inspiration stemmed from our growing understanding of dreams as tools for introspection, embodying an abstract and hyper-subjective extension of our experiential existence. Dreams are not only affected by our lives but also influence them, creating an experiential continuity between the two. We aim to explore this idea of how a person’s external and internal realms of perception are interconnected, and how this influences our own subjective reality.
Through our film, we aim to viscerally explore these experientially-driven phenomena, creating a universally resonant experience for the audience. We hope to develop a cinematic mosaic that remains open to the audience’s subjective interpretation, allowing each viewer to apply their own experiences and develop their own unique perception of the story. The film’s story is not plot, but experience.
Every donation matters to our campaign, and they will all come together to allow us to achieve a high quality level of production and fund ambitious aspects of our project such as the detailed and intricate set build. Even the more standard parts of our production could not happen without your support, from food on set to paying for fuel.
Support, however, is not only financial, as we appreciate that not everyone is able to donate. Sharing the project and following our campaign can also do a world of good to get the word further out, and you can find us on Instagram and Facebook: our pages are listed at the top of this site. These are the places to be to stay up to date with our production, but if you are not on social media we also have a mailing list - which if you email us at [email protected] - you will be added to if you wish to receive exclusive production updates.
This chart breaks down where your money will go by department, with the largest chunk in the Art Department for the aforementioned set build. We hope that it's useful for visualising our thought processes financially and that it demonstrates our level heads as we embark on our campaign and project!
We are enormously grateful for every level of support and truly could not do this without you.
Tom Potter
Writer & Director
I’m Tom – the Director and Co-Writer for ‘Lullaby For The Lost’. I’ve been making films since I was 6 years-old: starting out in Film-Editing, I taught myself how to digitally edit, as I organically cultivated my understanding of film as an audio-visual art-form. Throughout the years, my artistic identity as a young filmmaker has naturally moulded towards an increasingly experimental filmmaking philosophy. I’ve grown to recognise film as a near-boundless art-form, and have strove to unravel the formalistic boundaries of the medium through diverse experimentation with pure film-form as a means of artistic expression. What we express through film must come from within, it must remain true to the very fibres that make up our being. I am abundantly inspired by my own experiences, allowing their emotional impressions to dissolve into the stylistic identity of my films, as I hope to truthfully express my own perceptions of my subjective reality through this art-form.
‘Lullaby For The Lost’ was foundationally born out of my own experiential perception of subjective memory within dreams throughout my life. Among my dreams, I often drift back into the recesses of my childhood. These fleeting moments no longer exist, yet they remain eternalised within the self-curated dreamscapes of my unconscious being. Throughout development, Arun (Co-Writer) and I reflected upon our own personal experiences in an introspective writing process, exploring how memory and dreams diffuse into one another throughout the course of our lives. It is this intimate experiential dynamic that lies at the heart of our filmmaking approach for this film, as we hope to cinematically unravel subjective reality through an honest expression of the human experience – allowing each audience member to apply their own experiences to the film and interpret it in their own way.
Since arriving at AUB, I’ve directed several University productions and learnt a great deal through this – I aim to continue this creative-practical learning process onto the larger production scale of ‘Lullaby for the Lost’. I am incredibly thrilled and grateful to be leading a crew of immensely ambitious and skilled filmmakers and artists alike. My crew’s passionate desire to maximise the creative potential of this project has been apparent since day one, and I am so very excited to develop this film further with them as a collective artistic-vision.
Arunveer Kahlon
Co-Writer
Hi there, my name is Arun and I’m Co-Writer on ‘Lullaby for the Lost’ alongside our Director, Tom. He first came to me with an idea for the film early this year, and over the past few months we have gone through a dynamic creative process of refinement and exploration. The appeal of the project was to explore internalised dreamscapes, and the interrelationship between conscious and unconscious perceptions. This led us to the concept of the malleability of subjective memory, and how our perceptions of a single memory changes throughout our lives, given the context of which it is remembered. The writing process really took a turn for the better when we attached these concepts to our own experiences of nostalgia, and this is something we hope to continue when working with the crew. My job as a writer is to work with Tom to provide enough source material and create a groundwork for the rest of the crew to collaborate and work towards producing a piece of work that allows viewers to connect their own thoughts and feelings to the ones depicted on screen.
Orla Fleming
Producer
Presenting an entire life on screen through an exploration of a shifting recurring dream fascinated me about Lullaby for the Lost from the start. The approach toward depicting memory within dreams and engaging creatively with nostalgia connected actively with my own intrigue surrounding the construction of memory - particularly at an early age - and how dreams engulf or compliment that process. Our director Tom has been a delight to work with so far, with a keen clarity of purpose and certainty of vision, but the collaborative and collective direction we want to push toward within the team is incredibly exciting, and I look forward to helping guide that. My experience in similar crew structures working on experimental film will allow me to compliment and lift already brilliant practitioners and artists, and I can’t wait for the process to evolve as we piece together this wonderful project.
Ben Lincoln Irfan
Director of Photography
Over the past two years at AUB I’ve been fortunate enough to explore my own style of filmmaking as a writer/director, understanding how to collaborate with each department, communicate with individuals, and express my vision. This experience has been invaluable in my personal and professional development, but for my final year I’ve decided to focus on expanding my specialist knowledge, envisioning someone else’s perspective by light and lens, an area I’ve been expanding through my studies in 35mm and instant photography.
As a first-time cinematographer on this course, there’s nobody I’d rather collaborate with than our director, Tom Potter. Since first meeting, our shared technical experimentation, and conceptual fascination with the dream of being, have connected us. What drew me to this project was his dedication to the practice of art, and the freedom it affords me as a cinematographer, recreating experience with an emphasis on subjectivity and interpretation. As a practicing lucid dreamer, I’ve been utilising my own experience of dreams to visualise the unstable internal world of our protagonist on screen. I’m honoured to have this opportunity to balance the blurring of realism and symbolism with emotional cohesion, connecting abstract decaying imagery to the viewer’s subconscious.
Romy Roulin
Gaffer
What drew me to this project was its ambition to reconstruct the world of unconsciousness: a complex state that continues to replicate and represent our conscious world. Alike our memories, the evasive and unreliable quality of dreams will be the main challenge to portray on camera without losing their essence. My approach to lighting is to enhance the beauty of our conscious and unconscious worlds. That is to highlight the undertones of the scenery that gets ignored and simplified in our waking life. That is to embrace the playful and illogical principles of dreams and apply them to practices on set. That is to not be afraid of experimentation and continue to make and break the rule of filmmaking. With my experience working on alternative films throughout the years, I am excited to work closely with each department to create this incredibly personal experience of the dreamer into an ethereal, universal immersion on-screen.
Ella Moore
Production Designer
From the early stages of Pre-Production, I felt connected to this film as it explores the significance of memories and dreams – something that we all internally accumulate. Therefore, I wanted my focus on design to reflect the personal growth within the protagonist's psychological state of mind, taking inspiration from Salvador Dali’s ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ to convey a contrast of perspective between his external and internal realities. Collaboration with the other departments is vital in this project to ensure there is a shared, collective style and vision in creating the hypermnesic dream. I can't wait to see this project develop and challenge myself with 3 studio set builds to depict moments across the protagonist's waking and dreaming life which transforms in scale, tone, texture and colour.
George Gower
Editor
Working on an experimental film provides a unique method of filmmaking that I have not previously experienced, having only edited narrative and documentary films during my time at the Arts University Bournemouth. Using a split-screen to showcase the changes in a person’s life from birth to death provides a unique creative challenge, however this is something that I am more than willing to undertake to enable the success of the project. Using experimental filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage as reference points should provide a wholeheartedly alternative approach for Lullaby For The Lost which should significantly enhance the visual language of the film. The ways in which the film represents dreams and memory is also of immense interest for me as an editor. Lullaby For The Lost will attempt to represent the ethereal imagery created by dreams through the use of double exposure film imagery, which is inspired by the aforementioned filmmaking practitioners.
Haydon Anderson
Post-Production Sound Designer
Sound will forever be something that exists as abstract in the human subconscious, but a question that 'Lullaby for the Lost' asks that interests me as a sound designer is how these abstractions of memory change throughout the life of a person. Whether it is a song from your childhood or the sound of a special person’s voice, we are going to find new and inventive ways of abstracting these constants in the main character’s life to fit the eras he is dreaming in.
Caitlin Williams-Macklin
Hair and Make-Up Artist
I’m Caitlin - a Hair and Make-Up Artist who dabbles in theatre and film. Both include different skills and different approaches to accommodate those contexts, allowing me to create beautifully diverse work. With this film, I felt pulled in by the dreamy element of the story. Dreamlike colours and visuals engaged my creative mind to create hair and makeup for this period film. Distant memories and personal dreams made this a project I want to be involved with - the director and the team as a collective.
Crew photos by Ben Hubert & Ben Waters
Graphics by Bexley Baker