Composing Music and Songs

In Chapter Three of The Dream Hat, Eon sang the song "Sleeping Beauties".  I originally hired a friend of mine to sing all of Eon's songs.  The singer had a great voice, but had a bit of dyslexia and jumbled some of the lines in the song.  Later we had a falling out and I decided, for legal reasons to sing it myself.  I tried to match the softness of his voice, because my voice is a little harsh.  I heard an interview with Joseph Mantegna on Fresh Air.  He talked about how he had to sing like Dean Martin for the HBO Rat Pack movie.  He said he yawned through all the songs to really open up the back of his throat.  I tried that trick and a lot of my friends thought I sounded like the original voice I hired for the songs.  That gave me confidence to sing all the rest of the Eon or Slink songs.

Currently Chapter Four is playing this week where Will meets The Purple Man who has held his breath to stop time.  To convey the feeling of being conscious of your breath, the background music sounded like the ticking of a clock and the melody was played only by wind instruments.

The Dream Hat Graphic novel

Chapter One of The Dream Hat went up on Facebook, YouTube and my website www.hammination.com  Thursday May 7 and it is getting good reviews.  That makes me happy, since the film was such a labor of love.  People are waiting for the next chapter, which will be posted Thursday May 11.

To reward the people who were kind enough to sign up to watch for the first week, I am in the process of turning The Dream Hat into a graphic novel, and getting them a free download of it.  The Dream Hat graphic novel will be on sale on my www.hammination.com site in a few weeks.

I am also contacting theaters and film societies who are interested in possibly showing The Dream Hat.  More about that later.

I am designing some Dream Hat tee-shirts too.

Super Dreamers

Dreams are how our brain digests information.  I think the brain works a lot like our digestive tract.  The important nourishing facts get stored away in our memory and the unimportant facts get excreted.  In other words, forgotten.

A long time ago, I used to keep a dream journal.  I would wake up and write down what I could remember of my dreams.  At first it was just a fragment of a dream in a sentence.  Then it became a paragraph.  Then as I exercised the memory muscle and primed the pump, I started to remember whole dreams that took a couple pages to describe.

I would notice after coming back and reading these journals months later that recurring patterns occurred in my dreams.  When you found those patterns, they were something important you were wrestling with and by seeing the different ways the same patterns were expressed in different dreams, it was like looking at the same thing from different angles and you could start to isolate what was so important you were trying to tell yourself.

So one function of dreams are important themes in your life, your own personal mythology like what Joseph Campbell used to talk about.

Another function of dreams is just to process the day's experiences.  What you need for survival gets stored away like I said, and the rest is flushed down the mental drain.

Then I read an interesting article in either Time or Newsweek when I was in high school.  It said that sometimes when you have a dream that you are trapped and can't get away, it's not some profound existential dilemma that your life is in.  You have simply rolled over in bed and you are laying on your arm.

A lot of people say they never dream.  Everyone dreams.  They just don't remember their dreams.  For artists, it is not enough to dream and internalize their dreams.  They have to take their dreams and externalize them in some way.  It can be a sculpture that you can walk around, a song that you can hear, a drawing, a movie, or a game.  They have to put their unconscious out there for all to see.  (I remember at the museum in Pasadena, I first saw a Jaques Lipschitz cubist sculpture.  It was amazing.  It was like a Picasso cubist painting that you could walk around.  Same with Alexander Calder's mobiles.  They were like being inside a Joan Miro painting),

The impulse is a lot like the scenes in Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where some people were making music, and others were building a mountain in their mashed potatoes.

For a long time I had songs in my head and I could never play all the parts I could hear in my head.  I would record them with an acoustic guitar and when playing back the recording, I would sing the harmony part that I couldn't record.  The day I got GarageBand, I recorded one of my songs with all the tracks I had heard in my head.  I laid on the couch and listened to it with headphones.  I feel asleep.  Not because I was bored with my own song, but because my mind had been freed.  I didn't have to carry any of the parts in my head worrying that I would forget them.  It was like housecleaning.

So everyone dreams.  But artists are super dreamers.  In some way, they have to make their dreams exist in physical reality.

Over the next few months, I will talk about some of the themes of The Dream Hat, some behind the scenes trivia and other topics on my mind.

I have been receiving emails from people asking questions about my book How To Get A Job in Animation (And Keep it).  I plan to gather a lot of those questions and put them in this blog and it may turn into a new book.

I also have some ideas about improving public schools so kids can learn more.  It's based on some techniques that I have used in my classes.  It may turn into a documentary, if I can put a few people together.  

Welcome to The Dream Hat blog.  It is named for my animated feature The Dream Hat which is available at www.indieflix.com on DVD or streaming video.  Starting Thursday May 7, The Dream Hat will be shown for free one chapter at a time on YouTube, my Facebook page and on my website:  www.hammination.com.

The Dream Hat tells the story of a village where everyone has lost the ability to dream and how a little boy with a magic hat sets out to show them how to dream again.  It is in the tradition of Yellow Submarine, The Point, and The Phantom Tollbooth.  It was a labor of love.  I wrote it, animated it, voiced all the characters, and composed all the songs and score.  It took six years because I was teaching animation full time.  If I had only the film to work on, it would probably take a year and a half.