The Nightmare Society was born from a conversation I had with a friend late one night. This friend texted me in the middle of the night telling me they were unable to sleep and requested I give them a list of songs that I thought would be conducive to getting rest quicker. In this moment I thought nothing of it, but later I asked myself a question: What if there was a service that you could contact and they would manually enter your dreams and relive your nightmares.
The Nightmare Society is the answer to this question. The main idea is a secret society of people whose job it is to travel into people's dreams and fight their nightmares in one way or another.
In the actualization of this project the story follows the same narrative as my conversation with my friend except this time the service does exist. After the dreamer "Lily" wakes up in cold sweat from a nightmare she is having she immediately contacts the Nightmare Society (NMS for short). As she attempts to get back to sleep a job request is sent to a NMS agent who then enters her dream and explores her mind until they can hunt down the nightmare that ails her. After dispatching the nightmare the agent leaves the dream and returns to the waking world.
Though the original idea of the Nightmare Society is very fun and whimsical, I could not help but think that a very real application of something like this could be quite sinister or even dangerous. Something like this left unregulated could cause many problems in the real world so I opted to make this a more privatized service regulated by the government. It does not remove the dangerous or sinister elements, but does solve the issue of regulation. Because I wanted this aesthetic I decided that the NMS would be very professional and clinical when it came to entering dreams and messing around in people's heads.
The most important thing I wanted for this project was to create quality animation and to give good animators a platform to show off their ability to create quality animation. The best way to do this for as many animators as I could showcase was to write the story then assign different animators different sections of the animation to show off each of their different styles. The style change worked well with the idea of being in a dream as dreams are often disjointed and fluid. This also got me thinking about how to show the audience we were swapping from reality to dream then back again. This gave me the idea of live-action footage encapsulating all the animation. As we get deeper into a dream we get more animation.
The plan for The Nightmare Society is to create a series of simple short stories revolving around the interworking of The Nightmare Society that could be strung together into a more complex narrative with a revolving cast of animators being showcased for each episode. I wanted to keep it as unconventional as possible.
[Unfortunately this section the Nightmare Society was produced during COVID so many parts of the production was very limited.]
Animators
Moodboard
The main works I looked at when conceptualizing The Nightmare Society. For dream focused narratives I looked at the Christopher Nolan film "Inception", the Richard Linklater film "Waking Life", and the Victor Fleming film "The Wizard of Oz". I had not seen the Satoshi Kon animated film "Paprika" until after the production of the Nightmare Society but it did influence many of my concepts I had for this project I produced after the completion of this section of The Nightmare Society.
Other sources I looked at for this project were the 505 Games and Remedy Entertainment 2019 game "Control" and the Hideo Kojima game "Death Stranding". Control was a reference for a supernatural phenomena that is analyzed, regulated and controlled by the federal government who keeps the entire thing a secret. A lot of the themes moods and aesthetics of The Nightmare Society (especially the authoritarian dynamic between the agent and the operator, the clinical nature of the assignment, the naming conventions of elements, and the organization of the NMS). Death Stranding was a reference I used mainly because of the concept of a "beach" they use in the game. As a beach is a personal interdimensional space every individual has in their mind that connect them to another plane of existence, I thought a place like that could be similar to something that could connect a dreamer to another dream. I thought, "what is dreaming if not our mind entering another plane of existence?"
I was drawn to all of these IP's because they all included something I wanted to bring to my project. May that be the strange and fantastical visuals, the vast landscapes that mimic real life, the ethereal nature of the spaces these character exist in, the special equipment for exploring dreams or even the fact that they wear something specific like a pants suit.
Storyboard
Character/Style Concept
As an example for the animators I hired, I gave them this image of the characters in this project. I showed them the character in my style (middle) and the were given free range to create the same character in their own style. As long as the character they made matched the profile of my original character it was fine.
Originally based the main character of Adonis after myself as I was playing him in the live-action sections and voicing him.
When discussing how to complete each section of the animation with my animators I gave them free reign to do as they wish stylewise with the caveat that they had to follow a few constants across the whole animation. The first is the profile of my character. Adonis is a black man with a dreadlock bun. He wears a black suit and tie. Eshe is a mixed woman with short red hair and green eyes also wearing the black suit that became the uniforms of The Nightmare Society agents at this point. The second the setting. As this was set in a dream they were able to take some creative licences. However, I also gave them the storyboards to help guide them in what I was looking for just incase they were confused by how freeform the prompts were.
Characters
When it came to the characters in The Nightmare Society my first and foremost thought was a dedication to putting minority characters in the forefront. Along with animators revolving in and out of the series I also did not want to be tied down to any one character being the "face" of the series. I wanted as many different types of people to be seen in an artistic place. I did my best to include people of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, ages, sexual orientations, and gender identities as possible with the hope that as new people work on this they create an even more diverse cast to the nightmare society.
In this "episode" of The Nightmare Society we get to see the agents Adonis and Eshe as well as hear the voices of Evangeline and Mira with a reference to the Director of the Nightmare Society Chrysanthemum Abaddon.
If this series were to progress each episode would feature and follow the story of a different character until each character has had their own dedicated episode. Characters who were featured would not be barred from future episode. Just like in this episode other characters would appear as supporting characters in another characters dedicated episode. Along with each episode the larger story would be woven in to reinforce the connection from episode to episode. The above episode would be Adonis' episode with the Eshe after credits scene being a precursor for both her episode and/or the larger story for the entire series.
Nightmare Cards
The Nightmare Society App
When workshopping how to improve my concept for how The Nightmare Society worked, I thought of it working like an app. Many of my colleagues described this version of the cards as Uber but for dreams. What you see here is how the app would work from the perspective of an agent. It uses the methodology of deconstructing the parts of the card (as described in Nightmare Cards V1) and shows the aforementioned agent a close approximation of what they are getting into by accepting the job and entering the dream.
The app would present the type of dream/nightmare and the appraisement of the danger level against the symbols seen then give biographical information of the dreamer. The Account number would have some significance to the dreamers name as well as denote weather or not the dreamer was using the premium version of the app. (NMS is for the regular version of the app and NMSP is for the premium version)
This episode of the nightmare society takes place in 2021 with access to mobile devices and other modern technology. The b-plot of the nightmare society follows a push to make the NMS a publicly used product that actually works as the service I asked for at the conception of this project. What you will see are small details in the above examples of the app where some users have a psychological profile attached to their job request (seen in the top right corner). This brought up during the episode when Adonis asks for psychological evaluation of the dreamer but is denied. When you see her profile show up on his phone screen the psychological profile tab is nowhere to be found.
This where I wanted the B-plot to cause some contention in The Nightmare Society where this transition into the public use of their service makes risk of taking a job more dangerous as they don't know exactly what they are stepping into.
Next you can see how the app in the episode functions. I took my Adobe Illustrator file of the app and animated it in AfterEffects then played the video on my phone screen during the live action section of this episode.
NMS ID Badges
The third form of the Nightmare Cards came in the form of ID badges for the staff. I thought that since they were all government employees they would all need some sort of identification to allow them to move freely around the in this space. I wanted something that still read as a membership card for a super secret club and opted for another use for the Nightmare Cards. Their style was so versatile and the abstraction of the symbols added a very fun mistique to what the cards mean and how they are used. Just like the original cards (see Nightmare Cards V1) these cards too have a simple but undefined code to determine the rank, department, number designation and clearance level for each member of the nightmare society.
I created a unique card for each member of the society apart for the agents as the agents are the "stars" of the show so to speak. Since they were the ones who did the physical work of the nightmare society I opted not to give them nor the director a card for the time being. Everyone should know who they are as they are so integral to the day to day of the NMS. This sentiment came about because I was stuck with giving the agents a proper title for their department. It wasn't until I created a the Judas character named Shade (aka Maria Castellos) that I found a title I liked: Arbiter.
Nightmare Cards V1
The original versions of the nightmare cards started out as seen below. They were supposed to be a supernatural phenomena that occured within the walls of The Nightmare Society to determine the danger levels of the dream agents would be entering. There would be a method to the madness of the symbols but no hard and fast rule to determine exactly what the symbols meant. There would be an assigned danger level for each shape depicted on the card. 1 shape meant a threat level of 1, 2 shapes for threat level 2, 3 shapes for threat 3 and so on. The colors determined an intensity of that threat level with only three variants. Light yellow for low intensity, red for medium intensity and black for high intensity. These shapes and colors then quickly became the official colors and symbols of The Nightmare Society. They would change frequently and be implemented to the supernatural nature of the NMS. I later scrapped this idea of the card as the identification became too tedious convoluted and difficult to decipher. I later returned to these cards as a relic from NMS past. These were then the old version of how dreams were measured until newer methods (Above) became available.
NMS Deep Lore and Story Seeds (WIP)