Adam, through his unconsciousness, stirred his feelings by finding an intimate desire, his Eve. In this dream, she was a product of the animation of photographs. Adam wishes to recover his companion after a break-up (an unconscious thought of his heart), and he gets it but as an image broken by him that is recomposed. A living photograph. She looks at him, beckons him into the frame and tries to get out, but the dangers of Adam's world prevent him from doing so. To do so he will have to enter her world, both of them being photographically animated.
"Then Yahweh God caused a lethargic sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept he took one of his ribs, putting flesh in its place; then from the rib taken from the man Yahweh God took the woman and presented her to the man,..." (Genesis 2:21-22). The myth of Adam's sleep is also known as the sleep of intelligence, a passive ecstasy in which the inactivity of the mind calms reason. For the creation of the woman, who is the irrational element, Adam's consciousness must have been asleep. From that unconsciousness is born her complementary replica to live always with him, to procreate and protect herself. A help that is appropriate as mutual and reciprocal. But in El sueño de Adán [Adam's dream] by Mercedes Gaspar the myth happens in a different way.
El sueño de Adán is presented with a room, as a solitary paradise to which the first man is subjected. "Imprisoned in a small bed, in a small room, almost naked". His sleep is solitude and chaos, darkness covering the abyss of his spirit. From this solitary Adam emerges his complementary double, his beloved, a reflection of his longing made into a living image. She fights against the dangers of the world outside the frame (which points to the desires and dreams of this male god), placating all the difficulties she encounters in her path. But their union is not possible because of the difference in the realities in which they live. Since she cannot access the three-dimensional format, from photograph to carnal being, he is transfigured into a two-dimensional being. Adam gawks at the tiny woman in the picture frame, caresses her, reduces her size to enter this new paradise, but then she grows and he throws himself into her mouth, as if it were a swimming pool. "The man enters her in order to be truly born into the real world." Finally they are both equal. She is born from the rupture of her picture at the hands of Adam, so too the new man is formed through Eve, emulating her state. Flesh of the same emulsified paper flesh, "a metaphor for the act of love, and childbirth".
After experimenting in Su primer amor with filming people at normal speed, separating their frames to animate them on the table with props and scale backgrounds or with still photos of the characters as a background to work on the animation, as in Sabía que vendrías, Mercedes Gaspar shot El Sueño de Adán, for the first time, using the pixilation technique. In this work he mixed the animation of people, objects, photos, plasticine and latex, the result of a year of tests, searching for solutions for effects and the construction of sets that could be animated.
Using a step-by-step motor camera, shooting frame by frame, he works with the actors as if they were puppets. The movement is divided into fragments, for which the actors needed props. Forcing the process by recording two out of four frames gives the movement a strange, unreal feeling. "It looks good, and it reduces the shooting time for each shot. Even so, the pace of the animation was slowed down, to create a permanent dreamlike state (a sensation close to the slow motion of silent films) helped by irregular tracking shots "measured by eye, so I can speed up or slow down fragments, normally I always start and end more smoothly, that is to say with more steps".
The pixilation filming technique requires human-scale sets, adding the disadvantages of a real film to those of the animation process. It is arduous, long and tedious work, as well as very expensive, due to the fact that it is a shoot like that of any film, in terms of technical and personnel requirements, aggravated by the slowness of an animated film. Each shot took an average of five hours, three days for the longest shots without actors and up to eight hours with an actor, while the details of movement of hands, feet, the face without animation, objects or dolls were done more quickly.
"It is not good that man should be alone; I will make her a helper like him" (Gen. 2:18).
