Monday, January 31, 2022

 

Dream World (a 13 mins Psyche Film)

 

The filmmakers who transform fantasies into videos with an audience of one

This film contains adult material.

If you can imagine it, you can find it on the internet – or so it’s been said. But, in the rare cases when this adage proves false, the team at Anatomik Media are here to help. This Los Angeles-based production studio, run by the husband-and-wife team Dan and Rhiannon Humes, specialises in custom fetish videos. The couple used to produce more traditional porn films, but found their calling in bringing people’s fantasies to life. In the short documentary Dream World, the director Chung Nguyen takes viewers behind the scenes at Anatomik, probing the often strange and unexpected, yet sometimes quite rich and emotional work of making dreams a reality.

While the studio’s initial commissions veered toward the sexual, the business has since become ‘something else’, as Dan Humes puts it, with the filmmakers now receiving all manner of requests. Sometimes, they’re asked to recreate a treasured or troubled childhood memory, giving their client the safety to revisit something that might have provoked fear, anxiety or excitement at the time, and to experience it anew. In this way, these custom videos can even be therapeutic – ‘an anchor’ tethering the viewer to the world.

Although it is a collaborative process, where clients send in ideas, sometimes even a script, and the filmmakers and actors work together to bring it to life, the enjoyment of the video is ultimately very personal, and the team might never know how it was received. Yet, despite this distance between business and customer, one actor describes the possibility for an ‘intimate, interpersonal connection’, because clients have trusted her with their desires and allowed her to embody them.

There’s a gentle humour without judgment, great compassion and evident joy in how the team approach their work, and the empathic way they view their clients’ unique requests. For the filmmakers and actors, it’s a privilege to be allowed to see this part of a person that’s usually a secret, and it’s deeply fulfilling to be able to make a client’s secret dreams come true. What some would treat with mirth – a foot fetish, say – is instead allowed to be an expression of something deeply personal, an appreciation for the beauty in what others find mundane. For the filmmaking team, these intimate details provide a meaningful glimpse into what makes us each uniquely human.

Written by Freya Howarth

Dream world | Psyche Films

 


 

 

 

 

In Search Of Forgotten Colours (18 mins AEON film)

Sublime colours brought back from oblivion – the exquisite effects of natural dyes

This striking and almost entirely wordless video from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London beautifully conveys the work of Sachio Yoshioka, the fifth-generation owner of the Somenotsukasa Yoshioka dye workshop in Fushimi, southern Kyoto. Since taking over the business in 1988, Yoshioka has pivoted from synthetic dyes to traditional Japanese methods that draw extraordinary, rich colours from bark, berries, flowers, leaves and roots. Yoshioka says he’s resurrected these pre-19th-century methods from historical documents and textile samples not to preserve history, but because of the unmatched beauty of the colours they create. Split into four parts, In Search of Forgotten Colours: Sachio Yoshioka and the Art of Natural Dyeing details Yoshioka’s work and methods, including his important role creating dyed paper flowers for the annual Japanese Buddhist Omizutori ceremony in the historic city of Nara.

Via Kottke

Director: Mika Kawase

Producers: Kazunori Terada, Kenji Hyodo

Website: Victoria and Albert Museum

3 July 2018

 Sublime colours brought back from oblivion – the exquisite effects of natural dyes | Aeon Videos