Fighting
falling asleep,
that sensation
of falling
How far have I fallen?
or is it 'where?'
The glow of the moon
offers just enough light
as i trudge across the croft
back to sleep
I found a bag of vhs tapes
in a chest in an old byre.
or was it a dream?
I could never find my way back there. Not when I wanted to at least.
A memory
formed
between
thoughts
or was it a dream?
Inspired by The Back Rooms, Uist, and some of the recurring dreams I had when I lived there.
I wanted to create a "quick" piece of work while I had a spare week or so and with the release of the Back Rooms movie, I thought I'd do something in the same vein. I always found the eery light of the late summer nights in the islands to be really creepy yet exciting and wanted to reflect that with this work.
Some of the ideas I've had in my notepad for a year or so since the family home was sold. We knocked half of it down when my parents bought it and my dad renovated it himself, basically single handed (with help from my mum, brother and myself). My parents are both dead so the house being sold stirred up some of the grief from that and I lost my job in March this year so creating this was quite cathartic and let me test out some different Unreal Engine workflows.
When we first moved, we lived in An Gàrradh Mòr (the big garden), a house with a huge stone wall around it which was a fairly apt metaphor for the occasional isolation we felt or were subjected to as "incomers" to the islands.
I've always watched A LOT of TV and find old continuity announcements to be very dreamlike and soothing so I used specific clips to reflect certain dates (the day I was born, my 10th birthday/first one living in Uist and the day my mum drowned)
I used a some Quixel megascans assets, the Leartes Carpenter's Workshop for my dad's shed, Ultra Dynamic Sky, EasyAtmos, Cinematic Lens Flares and a photogrammetry scan of the nearby iron age wheelhouse. The tornado is a VDB asset and for the effect of the shed blowing away, I used the motion graphics array/effectors in Unreal Engine.
Edit/Grade and sound mix was done in After Effects.