Project Muninn: Pre-Production Stage 1

Some of you may recall a while back I spitballed an idea about visualising specific memories from my past that influenced the person I would ultimately become.

I floated this idea as a way of creating a visual journey for my kids to look back on my life and understand who I am - and crucially - why. I do this because I fear I may never be able to pass on those memories, life, after all is unpredictable. So I want to create a ‘backup’ if you will of my life, in case of my untimely demise before I get the opportunity to fully impart the wisdoms I have learned to my children.

I don’t mean third person photos of my doing stuff either (although I will permit it), I mean this to be an incredibly personal, intimate view of my life as seen through my eyes so the overwhelming majority must be memories as I saw them from my point of view.

As I make my way through this journey, I’m going to blog about how I go about tackling it, for posterity, but also as a warning to others that sometimes it’s better to just leave stupid ideas in the stupid box and walk away.

Before I could even think about getting stuck in, I needed to plan, or rather start to think about planning to plan, before I could get to planning - this is a huge undertaking and will probably take a couple of years to do properly.

First thing was to give the idea slightly more corporeal form, thus it needed a name to add a bit of solidity. Project Muninn. After the Norse god of memory. A bit on the nose, but it’s all it needs to be.

Next was to start considering rules and boundaries, this is something I’m actively working on at the minute, but so far it looks like this:

1. Visualised memories should be defining moments in my personality - moments that created forks in the road, formed waypoints in my personality or were poignant or significant to me in some way.
2. It’s ok to elaborate. It may not be immediately obvious why I chose to highlight specific memories, so descriptives are fine.
3. Be brave. Some of these will be difficult to look back on, some I have deliberately shut out of my mind for a long time and with good reason. Still, this must be unflinching if it is to be genuine. Some lessons are learned painfully, but these are no less important.
4. Be honest. Memories should be accurate insofar as I recall them - no embellishing and no shortcuts, details are hugely important.
5. Some third person is fine. Some memories are preserved through photography, this is more relevant in my younger years before I could remember, but some of these are useful to help drive the narrative, partition sections off and just generally keep things nice and tidy.
6. Abstraction is fine so long as it is explainable and relevant. This however must be kept to an absolute minimum so as not to clog up the narrative.
7. Join the dots. I think it will be interesting to see my personality flow and twist through time, but only insofar as it makes sense to demonstrate personal conflict and doesn’t create too many dead ends.
8. Be strict. It would be very easy to get carried away and create something I could never finish so get the point across, but be practical about it.
9. Do no harm. This cannot be indulgent, it’s about sending learned wisdom to my children should I never get the chance to, it cannot be at the expense of other’s misery or feelings. Do nothing that harms other people.
10. Make your peace. There is a danger here of reopening old wounds and causing unintended damage to my own inner peace, I need to be robust about it and go in with the certain knowledge that the past is the past. Do not linger there too long lest you risk getting lost in it, stay on task and do not be maudlin. My primary responsibility is to my family first, this is a passion project and thus needs to be assigned an accordingly low priority.

That’s where I’m at. As a thought exercise this has been extremely useful, and has thrown into sharp relief certain things that I’m still considering. For instance: Do dreams count as memories? Some dreams remain vivid to this day and some of the scariest nightmares have helped establish boundaries within my personality or added weight to my values. This needs some more thought.

Similarly - does everything have to be 3D? Whilst this is my preferred medium, it might be interesting to flex in some other mediums where it suits. I’ll have to consider that more closely.

Elsewhere I’m tentatively starting to consider logistics. I’ve set forth in the rules that details are important, and that’s true, but there has to be a certain level of pragmatism in the interests of just getting shit done, for instance, am I going to go to the effort of modelling in agonising detail an container ship when I can get kitbash or buy one for less that ￡100, no, no I am not. Those sorts of things do not need the same level of detail as - and I assure you of this - one container ship is very similar to the next. Little things like that will save time without stripping the memory of accuracy or meaning.

This is going to be a long, hard road. I’ve chosen to do something patently stupid, however as I have learned, just because something is stupid doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have significant meaning.