(Picture unrelated.)

I’ll need to see this animated/rendered someday. If you’re more comfortable in Maya than in shoes, have at it. Or I’ll get around to it eventually.

The following is not in widescreen. It’s in regular 4:3, and I don’t know why. Just is. The backdrop is off-white but not much so, just a very little cream in there. There’s a hemisphere of water in the center of the initial field of vision, like a glass sphere’s been half filled, except there’s no actual glass sphere. If there were, it’d be thirty or forty feet across. Very slight breeze, enough to keep the water in a little bit of motion.

There are some rules to the camera, the point of view. As long as there is no motion, time/physics moves forward at the normal rate and everything remains in color. As soon as the camera moves or the angle changes, everything stops and the view goes into exaggerated monochrome. Exaggerated, meaning heightened shadows and lights.

There’s probably a soundtrack to this. The entire sequence is probably five minutes. Maybe it’s a music video.

Watching the water, directly ahead, maybe a hundred or so feet away. The camera remains motionless, and after a few seconds, the birds begin. They’re relatively generic birds, but they are blood red in their entirety – feathers and claws and eyes. They fly alone, across the viewframe from right to left, in straight lines. They do not fly within the glass sphere that does not exist, and there aren’t particularly many of them. Just a red bird, here and there, flying through.

After two or three leave the frame off to the left, the camera angles up a little and zooms in to view one of the birds up close. The bird accordingly freezes in the air while this motion takes place, and the world goes black and white. You can see from a decreasing distance that the bird is losing definition, and as the camera approaches, it becomes evident that the mass of the bird is liquefying from the outside in. The core mass hangs in the air, but as the dark grey feathers and wings and body take on the consistency of thick ink, it falls in slow motion out of the sky. This is happening off in the distance as well, out of focus. One or two others. The camera stops near the bird, and as it does, the color leaps back into place. Raining red.

Camera cuts to another angle of the water, similarish to the initial view. Watching them fly past, watching the water. With no visual warning, something falls from above the viewframe and hits the water – as the camera starts a gradual zoom, the action slows to a standstill. In the middle of the crater-shaped splash, you can tell that it’s a human, nude, in the fetal position (cannon-ball?). White hair, long-ish, probably male. Caucasian.

Camera moves quickly back to the original view. The human loses the momentum of the fall and sinks to the bottom of the water, but doesn’t fall out of the non-existent glass sphere. Just sits there, curled up.

Birds keep flying. Only one or two at a time.

(I’m not entirely sure how the camera angle is handled from this point on; it’s different in my mind each time.)

The human awakens. His eyes are white, no pupils. Pushes off of the bottom of the water with his feet and flies up, straightening up as he goes, erupts from the surface. Maybe five feet up from the water, he casts his arms out wide, angled slightly up, throws his head back and screams. Silently, not a sound. At this point, with water’s splash suspended in the air from his emergence and with the human in the center, everything freezes, goes black and white. (This would require camera motion, I suppose.) And he, like the out-of-focus birds in the background, begins to melt in slow motion. Only difference: the human melts into black. And just as he becomes completely black (this is literal liquid black), and begins to lose recognizable definition, physics resume. Thick black rain, into the water below. It doesn’t mix, but you can see it spreading.

Back to the original point of view. Watching the birds, and the now-blackening water.

There are a couple inconsistencies to this sequence, yes. First and foremost is the fact that, while time is ostensibly stopped, the “melting” carries on anyway in slow motion. Yep. Additionally, there are going to have to be a couple gradual movements of the camera that happen while time continues merrily on. This is contradictory to the aforementioned motion/time rules, so perhaps they need to be tweaked a bit. And a performance note: the human is always facing the right (e.g. not the way the birds are facing), his back to the left.

Anyway. This sequence brought itself into being on the train today, coming back to Rostock from Berlin. Listening to MCR, half-sleeping. It started out taking place in a lake, surrounded by grass and trees and such. Blue sky, all that. Ended up considerably more minimal/surrealistic by the time the train hit Rostock. It’s all very clear in my mind, and I think I’ve got it written up as best I can. You can probably assume that it’s cooler than it reads; I was never very good at describing what goes through my head. However, my memory being what it is, this is more for my reference than for your entertainment anyway. Take that.

That said, make what you will of it. I’m going to have to draw/storyboard this out at some point, might post the sketches if/when I do. If you have mad 3d skills (like, crazy-mad), let me know. Be aware ahead of time that I am nearly broke just now.

Cheers.