If there are two sides to every battle, two halves to every whole, then what happens if a person gets divided the same way? Will he know which is the real half and which is the copy? Will there be a universal paradox should the two someday meet? Will it be a straight black or white, good or evil split down the middle, or some combination of the two? Dichotomy is a film about a guy, another guy, and a droid with a lightsaber…
Unlike my previous project, Brains and Steel, which was from the beginning a concerted effort by several people to put a film together, this project didn’t start off as a concise plan. Rather, it sprang from a few dumb ideas while sitting at home several nights in a row trying to kill a few hours.
The original concept was to do another effects test, based on one of my earliest projects (one where I fight a clone of myself). In the process of planning an extended fight sequence, I realized it would be terribly complex and difficult to choreograph and film. My laziness won out over my desire to see a long fight between myself and myself.
But I did want to do some kind of piece where I had a prolonged interaction between two versions of myself. I kept that idea in mind, but it shifted more to the background as my original idea of a fight with something that wasn’t there (namely myself in another role) evolved sideways into an idea of a different kind of fight with something that wasn’t there, a CG object of some kind.
This was something I hadn’t attempted before, so I gave the idea some more thought. After figuring out what kind of character I thought I could feasibly model and animate, and as I was beginning to shoot some choreography test shots, I realized I could put both ideas into one project.
So I went with it…