Surrealism: Rene Magritte

Maybe a tad on the tangent, but some of the reasons why the likes of Burns work resonates so much is the storytelling arcs into the use of surrealistic techniques.

If 'they' can be called that.

For me, surrealism means superbly well observed story telling that is more real than real, and consequently feels dream-like, making people say things like, 'fuck me, that's like, surreal', because it reflects our interior world, our minds, which is a world built on ephermeral structures in our imagination; on scenarios that are perfectly impossible which entertain us for a whole day and then leave us, never to return to our thoughts, causing us to feel utterly naked and revealed in a way like never before in a public sphere.

See, sounds like bollocks already.

Surrealism is hard to pin down precisely because it deals with images and ideas that have poetic consequences and multiple meanings to different people.

It is slightly uncontrollable. It is courageous to work in surrealism. I think. It is the opposite of Hollyoaks (I used to like Hollyoaks) where the 'facts' of reality and the 'story' are all leading somewhere very, very plausible.

I don't want to fuck with the story structures we create on paper, but I do want to explore surrealism in the visual storytelling.

So, WFT surrealism?

Good place to start is Magritte. I love his work. What does it mean? Well, his work is not so 'surreal' that meaning is buried deeply. In fact, it all appears on the surface, and suggests to our minds multiple meanings, which can be perplexing, or simply interesting, fascinating, rewarding, or annoying if done badly. Nice bass line, which turns into a fairly poop song. Turn sound off at 43 secs. It's fucking surrealism for fuck sake.



I've always considered Horatio, as a detective, to have a poetic gift, partially as a result of his father's shamanism, to be able to see beyond normal reality and read meanings into what other people just consider nothing important. Sometimes he gets this right, sometimes not.

How we might do this visually? Magritte offers a clue. Taking 'normal' scenarios and adding another layer of meaning to them visually. Strictly speaking they are 'clues' to him and hopefully fun and interesting for the audience and for the designers.

It's his grace to have the wit to be able to read meaning into them. Though its a curse to because it means he can read into lots of different things, and sometimes you don't wanna know the truth.

Or maybe, simply, he has visions, sprouting up from particular things in the environment, and from these he draws meaning. Chance for lovely visual storytelling.

Not all the stuff I stick up is any good. Don't matter. Just inspiration. Skip forward to 2 mins, couple of ideas here.



And then, you gotta look at Erasurehead. Nightmare vision. Not where we're going I don't think, but then if he's tracking a murderer, someone whose sense of reality has gone awry?



Brain orgasm. Fabulous. This is my kind of surrealism.