TECHNICOLOR DREAMS: The 10th Anniversary

Dream on! Dream on! Dream on!

Now here is a relic from that past that really was from a different time . . . and as a matter of fact, may not have even stood the test of time at all.

TECHNICOLOR DREAMS was my experimental film in its truest form from both an artistic and technical aspect, but at its core, TECHNICOLOR DREAMS was a pseudo-autobiographical deep dive into my creative process as a Content Creator.

As a lot of artists will tell you, and I am certainly no exception to this rule, a sizable hunk of our ideas come to us in our dreams, and a vast majority of the better ideas that I've ever had have been sourced from the cavernous mines of my mind: I have had numerous TV show concepts, and even entire movies come to me in my dreams . . . it's not at all unlike what people have said about THE DARK CRYSTAL being the movie that Jim Henson saw in his head (which also may or may not explain why, at the time, that movie made sense to nobody but him).

Script sample

Still, dreams fascinate me, especially mine, because honestly, I rarely have what I would consider to be pleasant, or even "normal" dreams. That is to say, I would estimate about 98% of my dreams are incredibly lucid, vivid, trippy, disturbing, and borderline nightmarish . . . think of them as if Sid & Marty Krofft shows were written by Stephen King and designed by Salvador Dali. Cosmically, my dreams are just straight-up weird, maaaaan! Like I say, though, in as much as dreams like these are a constant source of the hebejebes for me, every once in a while, I will end up striking gold for an idea for a very ambitious project; at times, it's as if my astral projections are more like astral movie projectors showcasing a mental film festival, and it's from that mental film festival that many of my more ambitious project ideas were born. Ironically, I'm not one of those people who actually keeps a dream journal by my bedside, and that is something I've been reproached about . . . I am very lucky if I can remember all or any of the pertinent details of my dreams without writing them down, because more often than not, I will gradually begin to forget such details of these dreams throughout the rest of the day after waking up. Those that I do remember and have provided me with outlines and treatments, however, have at least made it through the development stages, ranging from scripts being written and characters being designed . . . unfortunately, that's about as far those have gotten anywhere. This is why TECHNICOLOR DREAMS has become the closest things of such dreams becoming a reality.

Designing Dream Sprites

Because of the nature of my dreams and how big of a source of inspiration they are, in February 2015, I finally decided to get a little creative with my own creativity, and do something of a personal deep-dive into this creative process of mine by actually making a film about it, which is why TECHNICOLOR DREAMS is a true experimental film - it didn't necessarily follow a story or a plot, but it was a way of showing how dreams can lay down the foundation from which you can build entire universes for the world of fiction. As a matter of fact, the entire concept of my being visited by a pair of dream sprite was one big alegory to this creative process of mine, with the dream sprites themselves symbolically representing a pair of similar characters for one TV show premise that came to me in a dream as far back as 2007 that I have really wanted to actually create and execute, but has still never seen the light of day.

But TECHNICOLOR DREAMS wasn't just an experimental film from an creative and artistic perspective, because there was also a lot of technical experimentation that went on behind the scenes as well. The production itself was fairly simple -helped by there only being one set: my bedroom- but this time I had some new toys to play with. It was my first production to be filmed in full HD, and also one of my first productions that was edited with a professional editing program: Adobe Premiere. I had already played around with Adobe Premiere with a previous production, THE WINDMILL, just to sort of familiarize myself with certain things I was able to do now that were previously unavailable to me in years past, such as lighting effects. This time, I wanted to try even more things that wasn't able to accomplish before, namely being able to overlay and blend film and video footage with psychedelic imaging to create dream-like sequences.

Editing TECHNICOLOR DREAMS in Adobe
Premiere. Oh, hey, that's a nice face, isn't it?

But it was even more than just that. One of the biggest influences on my production work has been the classic single-camera sitcoms of yesteryears that were shot on 35mm motion picture film, which gave them such a rich and distinct look that not only is lacking in many other shows that are shot on multiple cameras that record on videotape, but also severely lacking in this day and age of digital media in general. I have always wanted to emulate the look, feel, and aesthetic of the golden age of television, and now I could finally start doing that. As they say, everything is fixable in post[-production]; figuring out your camera's settings is a good way to achieve a certain look you want to capture on film or video, but it all can still be improved in the editing process. With Adobe Premiere, not only are there presets available that you can use to simulate the appearance of certain types of filmstock, but all sorts of other technical wizardry are at your fingertips to adjust your footage's brightness, contrast, color saturation, and even the framerate, to achieve the desired look you want - even as I previously mentioned regarding blending footage, I could now also employ overlays of grain and film dust to really give my productions that old 35mm motion picture film look I've wanted for so long, and continue to do to this day. Of course, I was still green around the gills in this area, and I still had a lot to learn - I'm even still learning to this day. I have been and probably always will be an artist first and foremost, and a technician second. Whenever I put a new project into action, it always begins from an artistic approach, so my mind doesn't always immediately take the technical aspects into consideration, which is why even as my production work began to improve, it still was far from perfect; I knew about simple adjustments (again, brightness, contrast, saturation, and the like), but I was ignorant and clueless about other technical aspects such as color correction, legal ranges, white and black balances, and so on and so forth . . . heck, even manual exposure and focus were foreign concepta to me at first because I was accustomed to working with cheaper consumer cameras that mostly operated on automatic settings that adjusted to your environment accordingly.

After all was said and done, TECHNICOLOR DREAMS premiered on YouTube on the night of Sunday, February 22, 2015. What was the critical response? It was a mixed bag, to say the least. Truthfully, TECHNICOLOR DREAMS probably became my most polarizing production to date: people either loved it or hated it, with hardly any middle ground. Those who enjoyed the film were able to appreciate it for its originality, and to see the then-visual and technical improvements in my content; those who hated the film found it to be too long, too dragged out, and too redundant. I did attempt to remedy at least one of these critiques: two years later on Sunday, February 26, 2017, I released a redux of the film that shortened its TRT from 18 to 13 minutes, but apparently, that wasn't much of an improvement, and the reception was still mixed. Looking back on it myself, I have come to the conclusion that another major problem with the film was that even though it was, admittedly, pseudo-autobiographical, it may also have been a little too self-indulgent as well . . . even when I couldn't think of a suitable title for the film (I considered such possibilities as THE DREAM CATCHERS and THE DREAM BUSTERS), I eventually went with TECHNICOLOR DREAMS, which was inspired by the Broadway musical JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAM COAT (because my name is Joseph, and because my dreams are so vivid, you could say I dream in Technicolor). I'm not at all saying that this was a vanity project, because I'm not too particularly fond of being in front of the camera as I am behind it, but the way I presented this concept was just from my own personal experience and perspective. While I'm sure there are countless other artists and creative individuals out there who have had similar experiences in finding inspiration for material from their subsconcious, the film may have been a litttle too esoteric that it excluded others and didn't necessarily resonate with a broader or more general audience. Of course, it also could very well have been the simple fact that avant garde isn't for everybody; in fact, most general audiences prefer to be told a narrative story that they can invest in and follow along with, which is usually why such experimental and artsy sort of avant garde filmmaking tends to go unappreciated and/or misunderstood by the average joe. I guess what they say is true, "True art is incomprehensible."

Ten years later, TECHNICOLOR DREAMS really does feel like it was made such a long, long time ago, and admittedly, is not something that I look back on with as much fondness as I do with other productions I've made over the years. Not only does it really not stand the test of time, but even the dream sprite puppets haven't survived: they ended up being damaged and destroyed in storage . . . guess that makes them fodder for the Dead Puppets Society.

Dead as a doornail

In conclusion, as I look back on TECHNICOLOR DREAMS, I wouldn't necessarily say I'm entirely proud of it. I would certainly consider it one of my better technical achievements; artistic, not so much.