THE MAKING OF "a dream i had the other day" (Patreon)

I say this a lot, but this is probably my strangest video to date.

WATCH THE MAKING OF HERE
password: myson

I'll also say that it's probably the most fun I've had making a video in a very long time. A lot of that is because—as you'll see in The Making Of—I spent a large portion of the process creating my son. My beautiful, beautiful son:

Let's talk about the impetus for creating this video.

DID I REALLY HAVE THIS DREAM?

Yes. Mostly. I distinctly remember having the dream of Karen and I worried about a hamster (that looked like a raccoon) destroying our couch, and right as the dream became nightmarish, the scary, weird looking raccoon-hamster said "Mommy... Daddy... You can't do this..." At which point I realized that I had nothing to fear about this raccoon-hamster, for he was my son. And then the dream became a beautiful celebration of our father-son relationship.

This alone was not enough for a video. Dream logic is ridiculous, and when a story exists in a world that has no rules, who cares what's happening in it?

SO WHY DID YOU MAKE IT?

Because it's extremely fun to visualize dream logic. ESPECIALLY when you try to do as much of it physically. I did a lot of post-processing on this video, but it was a joy to make and use a real puppet, and actually travel to weird places, and do a bunch of foley to make weird noises.

At its base level, this video was a whole bunch of fun experiments for me to try out. Here's a list of a bunch of classic dream-logic-isms that I tried to create:

1. Strange, surreal landscapes
I could have done this with a green screen, but that didn't seem fun, so I went to the most surreal place I could think of: the Salton Sea. I had never been there before, but boy oh boy did it fit the surreal bill. It's also very stinky.

I ended up talking to someone who lived close to the sea—they told me a lot about the history of this weird body of water and explained that the smoke in the distance must have been a controlled burn from someone nearby. Serendipity! It ended up working as a perfect (semi-fakeout) metaphor.

2. Swapping locations without explanation or traveling
I made sure to get a match cut between Salton Sea and my living room. I figured using a little datamoshing would allow the transition to be strange, but semi-seamless.

3. Wordless/uncanny speech
This always happens in my dreams: I feel like I'm talking, or listening to someone talk, but when I try to focus on the speech, I realize the mouths aren't moving correctly. The easiest way for me to accomplish this was by ADR-ing the entire video. It meant a lot of extra work after filming, but I really like how it turned out. We match our mouths just close enough to make it feel uncanny.

4. Realizing you're in a dream without being able to change it
I'm extremely jealous of anyone who can lucid dream. Every time I've realized that I was in a dream, I think to myself "Oh cool! That must mean I can fly!" And then I jump into the air and immediately fall flat on my face. My stupid brain can sometimes realize I'm dreaming, but it gets so caught up in how things should logically exist that I can never do anything fun.

I knew it would be too much to include that exact situation, but I figured if I pulled the camera out to see the lights/camera setup, I'd get the same "this is all fake" feeling. I threw in the applause sign as an extra little bonus.

5. Things disappearing from existence
I thought it would be funny if Karen got dragged out of the scene like someone removing a layer from photoshop, so that's exactly what I did. Also, having her fade out when things get scary is a classic nightmare situation for me: I think I've got backup, and then I'm completely alone.

6. Abrupt tone changes
Hence, the Karaoke track. I had thought about just filming my son and me in a cute montage, but I decided to write a song instead. After hearing how the song sounded, I realized it would be funnier and more absurd to fully change the format of the video. So swapping it to a pixelated 4x3 karaoke video felt totally right for me. Also, Karen made this incredible Son-themed recreation of the Sunfly karaoke image:

7. Dying
Hell yeah baby I'm always dying in my dreams. All sorts of ways. It's always funniest when the dream traverses the entirety of my life, so I went with that.

THAT'S ABOUT IT!

I let things get weird with this one, and I am so glad I did. There were some frustrating moments while creating it, but overall, when I had a silly thought, I let myself do that silly thought. It was great. I hope you all enjoyed it even half as much as I enjoyed making it!