"Sleep Paralysis"

The following design is my film portfolio project. The Film/Video major at Penn State is a "controlled" major and to be invited into it, one must complete a film portfolio. This includes submitting either a five minute film or a ten page screenplay that shows off your skills as a filmmaker. I decided to make a five minute film off of a condition that my roommate experiences - sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is a condition that occurs either when someone leaves or enters REM sleep. REM (rapid eye movement) sleep is the fourth and deepest level of sleep. Your brain is just as active in REM sleep than it is when you are awake. There is this internal device in the brain called the 'REM atonia' - it causes extreme muscle relaxation so that the sleeping body does not act on the internal thoughts. When REM atonia fails during REM sleep, that is the cause of sleep walking (as now the person starts to act out his or hers internal thoughts). However, my roommate suffered from hypnopompic sleep paralysis, meaning when my roommate was leaving REM sleep into wakefulness, the REM atonia was still active. My roommate would wake up, but because he could not move his muscles, he was essentially 'paralyzed' - all he could do it shift a little and breathe and wait until either the REM atonia wore off or someone shook him awake.

I designed to take this condition and focus a movie about it. I applied the design process - how could I turn this condition into a five minute movie? I decided to focus on the fear and anxiety one faces when they realize they cannot move and are stuck in sleep mode. Now that analyzed the premise, I had to brainstorm what would happen. How would what was going on in the outside world affect his dream? The main character of the film realizes he is in a dream but cannot awake, and when he hears his roommate about to go to the store for supplies, he struggles to try to move and alert him that he is in sleep paralysis. The next step was designing the film, which translates to filming and editing. Over the course of a long weekend, I was able to plan out a storyboard and shoot my short film. For the next few weeks, I edited and pieced together a rough draft. I tested the initial draft of the film on my audience and saw what they liked and didn't like. After hearing their critique, I went back and improved on the film - I made the cuts shorter and more precise, the audio more clear, and scenes color corrected to make the film visually appealing.

One aspect of the film that stood out was the camera/editing tricks I pulled off. Since this was about a character trapped in a dream, there had to be things that seemed off - obscure camera and angle cuts, or things that did not make sense. In one of the climaxes of the scene, the main character confronts a man dressed in a Panda costume only to find it is himself, as seen in Figure 26.

Figure 27: Sleep Paralysis Character Confronting Himself in Dream

Conclusion

After submitting the film in my film portfolio, I was invited to become a Film/Video major. This project was the first film I made, and by the time I completed it, I was already entering my junior year. I had taken a lot of engineering courses at that point and I was worried that I went through this process too much like an 'engineer.' However, succeeding and becoming a film major through this process made me realize how similar film and engineering are. Sure, they create different products and have completely different coursework, but the process in making a fiction narrative or a jar opener are the same.