Dream Journal
At the time when I was writing the script for this film, I was going through some tough times, the mental anguish and insomnia inflicted on me by the traumatic memories of my past in Syria were weighing heavy on my mind but I choose not to let it control my life anymore and I decided to confront those memories face to face by making this film.
During my college years in Syria, I was involved in activism, and with the help of some good friends, we were able to arrange some demonstrations against the corrupted Syrian government which put us in the line of danger and led eventually to some painful confrontation with this corrupt system.
After too many close encounters with death and having lost many friends to the tyrannical government I felt like I was leaving my country as a completely changed man.
In this film, I tried to revisit those memories one more time to show the viewer a visual representation of the burden of having witnessed a civil war, such burden follows you even after you leave everything behind.
Working on a project with such sensitive and personal matters was not easy, to say the least, but I believe that this topic is really important and worth every single moment of reliving some of the hardest situations I saw in the war.
I really hope this film helps other people with similar experiences to get over the harsh realities of their past.
I made this planning to divide the workload into manageable sections so I can easily meet the deadline for this project on time.
I decided on this limited color palette to help me speed up the production and to be able to direct the viewer's efficiently attention using two colors with high contrast.
Final model sheet of the main character.
Early sketch of the main character.
The first draft of the storyboard (eventually I changed some of the shots in the final cut).
This is the final storyboard (here I was trying to quickly capture the main beats of the story with less focus on a finalized visual presentation).
This last shot did not make it to the final edit which was a shame but I wanted to share it here with you anyway.
Background Sketch 01
Background Sketch 02
This is how every animated cut starts then I clean up the linework and finalize the shading.
I would like to thank you If you made it this far and I hope that you enjoyed this animated short. Please do not forget to like and follow.
