Behind The Dreams

If you haven't seen Dream, just click here and get on with it.

Dream might look cheap. But, I'll tell you now, it was even cheaper than you think it was. Here are the ingredients:

50 cardboard boxes (yanked from the grocery store across the street)
10 dollars in acrylics paint (black)
4 Ikea window curtains (2 white, 2 blue)
Magnets and miscellaneous art supplies (stolen from work)
A small group of friends
$150 for food for that small group of friends

So, how did we turn all that crap into the vunderland of vundervul things you saw? Let me break it down for you.

First, the instruments:

About 7 years ago, a friend of mine was moving out of America. She had an art kit that she didn't plan on using after she left so she gave it to me and I've been using it since then. Anyway, it has a special feature that exactly whatever I need for the project will be in that case upon opening it. The blue on the base and the yellow on the keytar are acrylic paints that appeared in it. The red is from a fat red marker (stolen from work). The glittery tape was also found inside the art kit. Here's a detail shot of the head of the bass.

The detail work was done by Swinky (the singer in the video).

We didn't really do any research on the instruments. Will corrected me on a couple mistakes concerning the keytar (namely, I had no idea what the fuck a keytar looks like). The bass maintained its firm structure not from the card-board facade. Oh, no! There was a small broom taped to the back. We have since removed said broom and use it (again) to clean the house.

Next, Dreambot!

Ah, Dreambot! Will and I talked a lot about Dreambot's design in preproduction. We even went back and forth with a series of sketches. Most a-typical of how I shoot things. Will had the idea to make his head bigger than his body. If my memory serves me, he also gets the credit for the eye-system. But, really, when ideas are bouncing back and forth, it's hard to keep track of these things. In the video, there are two points of animation on Dreambot, his eyes and his chest atom things. Let's talk about the chest first since that's more simple to explain.

Dreambot's chest consists of two circles, one slightly larger than the other (one is the size of a kitchen plate and the other is the size of a cooking pot from the dollar store~ How we got them to match the circumference almost perfectly is a secret that won't be revealed here). In the center of the circles, we placed a white piece of tape. We used these as tracking points in After Effects and then slapped the computer animated atom chest things on top.

For those of you that aren't familiar with tracking point~ Basically, you can tell the computer that you want it to follow the movement of anything within the frame. The higher contrast the tracking point is, the easier it is for the computer to follow it. A generous white square in the center of an ink black circle is, if the program had emotions, exactly the kind of thing it loves.

The eye animation wasn't nearly so simple. This is Dreambot without any eyes. Don't pick on him. He knows how creepy he looks.

Dreambots eyes were two white magnets. Inside the cardboard were two other magnets to hold them in place. Will could move those two around from inside the suit. Here's the first test we did of that technology.

As seen in the video, the night before the shoot, Dreambot was still in pieces. His head was quite seperate from his still-drying body. Once the body was finished we realized that the eyes could only be controlled by one hand seeing as the other was needed to stabilize the body. So, we built this thing:

Taped to that piece of card-board were two other magnets. I must admit that the seperate eye movement was much more funny looking than unified eye movement. It allowed for a wider range of emotions (most of them being silly). But, we also had to stabilize the actual robot. Here's the back of that same device:

You can see the pencil marks Will made to measure the appropriate distance for the eyes. Now, I know what you're saying: Why didn't I include chopsticks in the list of budgeted items? A year ago, some co-workers and I did a presentation for a group of teachers and students. We needed to use three sets of chopsticks, so I went to the dollar store and bought a pack. A dollars worth of chopsticks is something to the tune of 100 pair. Anyway, my company reimbursed me the full dollar for the three pair they used and I kept the rest. So, stolen from work.

Third: The Blue Screen

Before getting into this section, let's look at a map of the apartment where we shot:

Swinky's room has three sliding doors so we can open up her room to the living room. This gave us the ability to shoot wider shots of the blue screen. Had her room not opened up, we would have had to shoot the blue-screen in front of the balcony windows to get a wide enough shot and that would have led to nightmarish destructive light spikes. So, we got lucky.

We actually had two different screens for the film. The first one was two different screens and the second was one. Let me explain.

For the shots of the space ship, we used either a green or a blue piece of construction paper. I made the space-ship at work, where I had access to all kinds of markers and colored pencils. I went a little over-board and used as many colors as I could fit on each side without it looking like a clown car. What I forgot to realize was that if you're doing a chroma key, you try to avoid having that chroma on the thing you don't want keyed out. So, whenever I was shooting from a side that had less green, I would use the green piece of construction paper as the stage. When there was less blue, I used the blue.

Here's how we made the wall-sized blue screen. First, Rebecca ironed out the curtains so they would be as smooth as possible for cheap (and I mean, CHEAP) Ikea curtains.

Then, we laid down a layer of white curtains to create a buffer between the highly textured wall and the blue screen. The far wall of our apartment is made of solid concrete. We broke a couple of thumb-tacks trying to challenge that fact. So, we used tape. After that, we laid down the actual blue curtains on top of the white ones. We have no direct pictures of the finished screen, so you'll have to settle for this collage. From left to right, you can see Mao photgraphing her (apparently exciting) lunch, Viking-Marta in her night-before costume check, and Will giving Dreambot... an examination.

In the picture with Marta, you can see the dark blue hem where the curtains over-lap. I expected this to create more problems in post, but it wasn't that bad.

You might also notice that the curtains don't go all the way down to the floor. This is why you never see anyone's feet once they leave the space ship. We didn't have enough curtains to get a clean full body key. Originally, I wanted them on laser-powered surf boards, but because of the limited technology, it was changed to a more canoe-like device. The only time that feet are exposed is when Princess Eilala is being Laser Lifted into the Dream Canoe. If you look close, she has no feet in that shot.

The curtains are now back up on the windows.

Fourth: The Sets

We built two main sets for this film. The smaller one was done by Kentaro Kaji. Here's a shot of him working on it:

In that image, he is working on the wall that Eilala was getting electro-tortured on. To his direct left, you will see our fridge. We couldn't unplug the fridge while shooting because we needed the cool refreshing beverages there-in to remain cool and refreshing. So, we covered it in cardboard.

As for the living room, it usually looks like this:

In that picture, you can see the sliding doors we opened to shoot the blue screen. To build the set, we closed them and covered them with the same massive sheets of paper we covered the left wall in. This really helped create the illusion that we had three walls around us when we really had 1 wall, 1 window, and some doors. I would continue to speak on this, but you need do no more than watch the video to see what the set looked like when we finished it.

And, that's pretty much all the commentary I think is interesting. So, I will leave you with the following two bits of media:

Thank you sincerely for reading. If you dug this, have questions, or anything, just e-mail me here.