Close Your Eyes

I chose to participate in two world building projects, this is my individual one. I pursued this story on my own time and I will eventually produce a full written story, poems, visuals, and a 2D animation.

I pitched this to my audience, a group of investors for this to be produced into a 2D animated short film, and potentially also a comic book.

Birth

When a mundane office worker suddenly can no longer sleep, he struggles to continue his normal life while resisting his deteriorating psychosis.

Genre: realistic fiction • psychological

Themes are explored through a journey of individuality, that emphasizes how significant creativity is to human existence, by revealing how dangerous it is for society to infringe upon these basic freedoms.

This is a man vs. self journey that takes place in our world, specifically an urban city. The city is very dull and smoggy, and from afar it looks like a sea of bleached coral reefs. Society is severely homogenous and life is very routine for everyone. You go to school, to go to college, to get a stable job that you work at for most of your life, until you eventually have the privilege to retire.

Our protagonist, and only prominent character, is a 29 year old office worker living in this city, who has been working at his corporate job for the past five years. his name is never stated in the story, because I want the viewer to inject themselves into the situation. The only other characters are extras, people that he sees, and coworkers he has insignificant interactions with.

Life

Visually, it starts very rigid, dull in color, and quiet. 

The story begins in the protagonist’s apartment when the alarm clock wakes him up. He does his daily routine to get ready for work, and he heads down the elevator to the bus stop. The whole city wakes up, and like a bird migration, everyone commutes to work in an orderly fashion.

When he gets to work, he scans in, grabs some coffee, work, meeting, work, lunch, work with some small talk with his coworkers in between. Then heads home. Does his nightly routine and works a little more before heading to bed. A painstakingly normal day.

But, he can’t fall asleep. First he’s calm (gets up and drinks water), but then it persists, he grows annoyed, then frustrates, then panicked and confused. The strongest emotions he’s felt in years. His alarm eventually rings again, which marks his first sleepless night.

He pushes through the day like normal, except a bit more slow and groggy, all the while he is thinking why he couldn’t sleep.

He gets home, does his nightly routine again, and heads to bed. He cannot fall asleep again, this time he consults the internet, tries meditation, counting sheep, but nothing works. He feels defeated. And eventually is met with the sound of his alarm ringing again. This continues for a couple more days, each day he gets increasingly frustrated at night to the point where he has become hysterical. 

Metamorphosis

This is the beginning of his metamorphosis.

On day 5 of no sleep, a coworker comes up to him and asks an empty “are you okay? You don’t look too well, you should take some time off of work.” a comment made purely out of concern for the productivity of the company. The protagonist gets the message and asks his boss for a week off of work.

He boards the afternoon bus to take home. And has his first hallucination. He is frightened and urgently rushes off the bus at a random stop. He is lost, since he has never actually explored his city, no one does.

The next several scenes is the protagonist physically exploring the city while having increasingly frequent and severe hallucinations. His fear of his visions turns ⁷nto enamourment since he is seeing the world in a whole new light due to his sleep-deprived-induced creativity. These hallucinations are mainly motifs of nature, but also includes imagery such as the Rorschach test.

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Death

visual – peak colorfulness/abstract, then.. Empty and desolate

The ending is ambiguous. Despite the title of this act, it is not clear if he dies.

Essentially, our protagonist is in his final form, as a result of his metamorphosis. 

But he goes insane, for a couple reasons.

• He is physically exhausted, his insomnia has persistent for several days
• Mainly, our world does not support his new self, like the yellow wallpaper, he becomes entangled in his own thoughts, his creativity has no outlet to go to.

This constraining nature of society is represented by the protagonist reverting to the visually desolate scene. He has an inner monologue, and the composition and his actions all mirror the opening scenes of the animation, to create a full visual loop.

Reflection

The film may end here, but the experience doesn’t. It leaves the viewer thinking, almost haunting them. Making them reconsider certain aspects in their life.

Which leads into why this project is important to me, I am extremely invested in critically thinking about complex ideas. Last year I wrote a research paper about redefining the American Dream, so for this year’s essay, I wanted to expand this upon this idea. 

Specifically how work culture in most corporate jobs is threatening human consciousness, because how its structured, it discourages certain forms of creativity and intellectual freedom. Humans are unique from every other species because of our creativity. Without it, like what is demonstrated in this city, we become like an ant colony. I explored some hybrid models of the typical 9-5 that could help combat this, and also delved into issues regarding corporations and people in power having attitudes towards creativity that is manipulative and subtly harmful.  To combat opposing opinions. These hybrid models actually improve efficiency in the short and long term, and we know this because we have seen major corporations like Google, Facebook, and Dropbox have already started implementing these work models.

This project is important to all of us, since we are all working so hard to be able to work in the creative industry in some form, and we recognize the value of imagination.

This is an important animation to create for the public because we as humans have progressed so much that we have started to prioritize certain desires over our needs, to the point where we are devolving our own minds. This film will be a wake-up call for people to recognize how detrimental standard work culture is to them individually and how it affects their entire lives, it is also a call to action for people in charge to realize this and start adapting their outdated work environments to fit the modern people we are.

Final 2D Animation