"They never did figure out what the purpose of dreams were. People with doctorates in things like Sleep Science posited all kinds of theories, from ideas about subconscious thoughts 'bleeding' into the conscious to theories of parallel universes. They did know that we operated better when we dreamt, though. It made us more grounded, more human, the irony being that we could never 'dream big,' as they would say. I couldn’t be anything more than what I was programmed to be."
Micro-fiction by Matt Barker
For this project, I wanted to make a simple animation. The problem I have with creating a "simple" animation is that the idea continually expands and, for whatever reason, it's easy to keep piling on ideas for what could happen in the scene. However, with frame-by-frame animation, each new element adds time and complexity (at least until I have a team of illustrators working with me).
This idea was inspired by reading PKD's, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". I wanted the figure to gently fall asleep. The above images show the various elements that needed to be isolated for animation.
For the second half of the dreaming android, the work came in the form of (re)coloring a shiny surface each time a new light came online.