The Dream_CinematicVideo_2023

Conceived during the Unreal Engine Storytelling Fellowship, The Dream began as a collaborative exploration of real-time animation and narrative design. This intensive program—hosted at 3Lateral’s Epic Games-backed studio—provided the project’s technological foundation and creative impetus. Within this incubator-like environment, artists and technologists worked side by side, supported by Epic Games and 3Lateral, to push the boundaries of virtual production. Using MetaHuman Creator, the team crafted lifelike digital characters, while full-body motion capture suits translated human movement into data, imbuing avatars with authentic gestures and emotions. In this formative phase, The Dream took shape as a short film, its core narrative structure born from the synergy of cutting-edge tools and collective experimentation.

At the heart of The Dream are its avatars—digital protagonists who function both as technical marvels and as poetic vessels of the story. Conceptually, these avatars represent fragmented consciousness, the lingering remnants of humanity in a world becoming increasingly virtual. They drift through the narrative as if ghosts in the machine: echoes of human memory given form in code. Technically, each avatar is a meticulously constructed digital entity, driven by advanced animation rigs and performance capture data that infuse them with subtle, haunting realism. Their behaviors and aesthetics are deliberately uncanny—glitching between human and otherworldly. This liminal quality allows the avatars to bridge human memory with technological existence, blurring the line between lived experience and algorithmic life. As the narrative evolved beyond the Fellowship, the avatars became guiding anchors of the story’s development, carrying forward the emotional weight of lost dreams and the promise of digital rebirth.

The visual and philosophical language of The Dream draws on diverse artistic influences, weaving together contemporary digital practice with echoes of performance, land art, and historical imagery. A key inspiration is Butoh, the avant-garde Japanese dance form renowned for its intense physical expression and explorations of transformation. Elements of Butoh inform the project’s motion and mood: the avatars move with a slow, contorted grace, their choreography embracing distortion and metamorphosis. This dance influence deepens The Dream’s meditation on existence, as each subtle gesture and pause reflects states of transition—between life and death, human and non-human, material and virtual. The philosophical underpinnings of Butoh, which delves into primal emotion and the body’s impermanence, resonate through the piece, lending it a ritualistic, dreamlike quality.

Equally integral is the influence of Land Art, particularly the work of Nils-Udo, in shaping The Dream’s immersive environment. Much like Nils-Udo sculpted natural landscapes into poetic installations, The Dream treats its digital world as a living canvas. The ethos of Land Art—working with time, growth, and decay—grounds the fantastical setting in a sense of tangible reality. It invites viewers to experience the virtual space not as a cold simulation but as an ecosystem with its own sensibilities, bridging the gap between the rawness of nature and the artifice of the digital realm.

Another layer of influence comes from medieval miniature painting, which unexpectedly guides the design of The Dream’s central creature. This entity, a significant presence in the project’s world, is crafted with the intricate detail and vivid imagination found in illuminated manuscripts. Much like the fantastical beasts curled in the margins of a medieval text, the creature merges the familiar with the surreal elements. By channeling the aesthetics of medieval miniatures, the creature embodies a fusion of historical memory and digital creation. Through these varied influences, The Dream achieves a unique aesthetic vocabulary, one that balances innovation and tradition, the body and the environment, the past and a speculative future.