Eternal Sunshine is like Inception in that it's a film that takes place inside the main character's mind. The premise sees Jim Carrey's character, Joel Barish, meet and fall in love with the beautiful Clementine Kruczynski, played by the timeless Kate Winslet. After a whirlwind romance things end up taking a turn for the worse, things getting so bad that Clementine opts to have Joel completely erased from his mind. He decides to follow suit and undergoes the procedure himself, but in watching the memories of her fade away piece by piece he begins to realise how much he loves her. In the end they decide to try again to make it work out.
It's a great story about loss and love, how we can remember the good times in spite of the bad and that it's never too late to make things right. Carrey plays (for the time) an uncharacteristically low-key character and Winslett is wild and tempestuous. The ironic thing is that they seem so completely unsuited for each other that you could see the entire cycle of meeting and forgetting happening time and time again; the nature of their characters is one that they would likely keep meeting and falling in love despite their best efforts.
This is, however, entirely besides the point...
I saw this breakdown of the VFX on Youtube.
I particularly liked the bit in the street where the run of shops is extended so that each time Carrey runs back and forth it appears to alter before the audiences eyes, the shops becoming emptier and the signs becoming blank with each pan of the camera.
What is also cool about the video is it shows how, compared to something like Inception, the things they do visually are pretty straight forward and don't actually require anything complex. That makes things less daunting.
This might be worth doing a more detailed case study of next semester.
