Creative Project: "The Journey Through"

"The Journey Through" by Martin Yee

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FD9AY8Xc1E

    I spent one entire night reading the complete Carl Jung chapter in Man and His Symbols, and I went to sleep shortly afterwards. The morning after, I woke up from an exceptionally vivid dream that when I could remember and visualize clearly as if it was a “vision”. Having read Jung’s chapter, I just sat there on my bed, thinking and trying to figure out what this dream meant or what my unconsciousness was trying to tell me. Thanks to Jung, I became aware that my dream wasn’t “meaningless” and I did not disregard the dream as if it was “just another dream”. Instead, I utilized the new tools supplied by the Jung readings and analyzed my dream. After five minutes of replaying the dream in my head, I was finally able to decipher some of the inner workings of my dream.

    In this dream, I wake up lost on top of a snowy mountain, wanting to find and go back home. I encounter a friendly woman who agrees to help me find my home, so we embark on a journey across a valley with killer insects, a hot dry dessert, the town with the train station, and eventually we hit my expected destination, anticipating my return home, only to find nothing but empty fields across the landscape. When I woke up from this dream, I was really confused by the strange ending and I couldn’t comprehend it. Some questions that popped up in my head were, “Where’s my home?”, “What happens next?”, “What’s the significance of the woman?” and so on. Equipped with new analytical tools, I realized that my dream was telling me that my home was not a physical place. In the dream, I was obsessed with the search for my home and I failed to realize that the journey was my “home”. After I had awaken, I was then able to figure out that “the journey through life is my home” was the main message brought from my unconscious into my conscious.

    After learning about archetypes in Jung’s readings and in my English 214 class, I farther analyzed my dream to identify archetypes within the dream. Archetypes are universal symbols that generally symbolize the same concepts for everyone.  In my dream, the killer dragonflies are an archetype for the obstacles and negative emotions that one encounters throughout life, such as the catastrophes that test our ability to survive in this world. Another universal symbol is the companion that I made during my journey because she represents the people we encounter in our lives, whom we share our journeys with. The companion(s) may also represent the love interest(s) or it could represent friends, families, or acquaintances that have helped or guided us through life and also involves the help or guidance that you have provided to others. As shown in my dream, a journey involves traveling and mobility, which represents the ever changing scenery we encounter each and every day. As the Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho put it, “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” No two days are exactly the same and each new day that we experience gives us the opportunity to grow and open our eyes wider. In Plato’s terms, mobility represents the steps we take in life as we attempt to move out of our personal “caves”.

    After experiencing such a vibrant dream, I knew immediately that I had to base my English 214 Creative Project on this dream because I wanted to share my “vision”. Right away, I knew I wanted to recreate this dream and present it in a movie format. Marshall McLuhan once coined the term, “The medium is the massage,” and even wrote an entire book under that title. Under my personal interpretation, I believe “The medium is the massage,” means that a medium has the ability to transfer or “massage” messages, ideas, and forms of thought processing from the medium producer to the medium viewer. Having read McLuhan’s work, I recognized the importance of using the correct medium to deliver the vision that I wished my audience to experience. For my Creative Project, I picked the most engaging mass medium available, the motion picture, which primarily engages the visual and auditory senses. I initially wished to transfer this dream into a realistic medium such as a live action movie, but since I didn’t have the multi-million dollar budget or a Hollywood Studio, I settled for a more practical means of conveying my dream. With the strict time constraints, I realized that the best method for depicting my dream would be in animation style, such as a slideshow or live graphic novel.

    Originally, I wanted to use computer programs to draw out scenes for my movie, but I wasn’t “tech-savvy” enough and failed to draw a stick figure even on such a simple platform as Microsoft Paint. So, I finally decided to go with hand-drawn illustrations (with the use of markers and color pencils) that I ended up scanning onto my computer to build my movie. The illustration process involved an extensive trial and error process because it has been four years since I last took an art class and I was out of practice. I finally decided that I was satisfied the scenes that I had drawn, so I began working on the stick-figure cut-outs. To produce my motion comic, I had to place my stick-figure cut-outs on top of my background sceneries and scan them for each individual frame of the movie. Then I had to write dialogue for my movie and select appropriate music and audio that would do justice to my movie.

    After presenting my Creative Project to my English 214 class, I was not entirely satisfied with the product because I noticed slight details that I left out or went wrong. The movie did not turn out exactly the way I had imagined it, so I revisited my movie and made minor edits to correct the faults that I witnessed during the classroom presentation. Now I can say that I’m satisfied with the final cut of this film (supplied by the links above) and can rest peacefully. Even though this project was tedious and challenging, I was compelled and motivated to complete this art piece because it felt awesome to transfer a part of me into a piece of work that can be viewed by others. This English 214 class has taught me that not only is the outside world important, but the world inside is just as important, if not more.