Dream House

by Sally Pryor 1983

 

Soundtrack composed by Willy Zygier

A pioneering 3D computer-animated 16 mm film made in 1983 in Australia

 

A dreamer imagines she can tour her mind, which is expressed as a house.

Each room contains objects and activities relating to different aspects of herself.

But during the tour something starts to go wrong...

 

 

 

Awards etc

Selected for screening at the 1984 SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre (the first Australian work, I believe)

Included in Issue 15, SIGGRAPH Video Review

Finalist in the Fine Art category at FX84 Computer Animation Film Festival in London in 1984

Film and Video Competition, Twenty-Eighth Annual San Francisco International Film Festival, 1985

Award of Merit in the Video Graphics section of the First Australian Video Festival in 1986

Part of the Australian Center For Moving Image (ACMI)'s collection

Accessible through Victorian College of the Arts film and television digital archive

 

Screened at QAGOMA cinema 2022

Exhibited at Radical Utopia: the Archeology of a Creaive City, RMIT Gallery 2023

 

In 1984 this film led to a job as a 3D Computer Animator/Technical Director at Cranston/Csuri Productions in the US

Plus, before leaving Australia, the chance to create the Countdown '84 opening animation with Andrew Quinn

 

The work is discussed by Stephen Jones in Synthetics: A History of the Electronically Generated Image in Australia

 

Traces of the production process; one outcome

part of production SIGGRAPH badge

 

Production

The challenge for me was to find points of intersection between what I wanted to express and what I could create

There were no image scanning or paint programs ... just linked points on graph paper and geometric transformations

Add to that, the limited ability to visualise our laboriously-coded animated sequences

And, due to the costs involved, just one chance to combine, colour and layer the sequences together, and integrate the audio

 

I have written about this creative environment in Snapshot One of a personal account of the vital signs of new media art

 

 

At a 16mm editing desk, with Andrew Quinn and John Bird: