Origins of The Dream Hat

Way before I created The Dream Hat, I created a science fiction comic book with a similar theme. I started shooting it live action and gathered actors through an ad in Dramalogue, which serves the same function as Craigslist does now. I had no budget, so I had to shoot fast. Unfortunately the lead actor didn't show up when we were going to shoot a beach scene and I never saw him again. I tried re-writing the script to shoot around him and it didn't work. I learned a lesson that Robert Rodriguez would later talk about in his book Rebel Without a Crew. If you aren't paying people, get all the shots that you need in one day, because there won't be any reshoots.

I was so frustrated with the problems of shooting live action on no budget that I decided my next project would be animated. I figured if my cartoon characters run off in mid-shoot, God is really trying to tell me something.

The Dream Hat started out as a twenty five minute film. It was done with pastel drawings on paper cutouts, hinged with scotch tape and thread. In the closeups the face was fully articulated for dialogue. I shot about five minutes of it with my 16mm Bolex. The story began long after Eon had come to the village and the plot was more like Dr. Suess' The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Slink was the henchman for a king who liked to be crowned with a more spectacular hat each year on his birthday. There was too much dialogue explaining where Eon came from.

When I got an Amiga computer with Deluxe Paint on it, I could animate it the way I wanted to. I started over and began the story on the day the Eon arrived in the village so I could show instead of tell. I promoted Slink to the villain and had him own the factory where everyone works. This expanded the story to the present 52 minutes. There were other songs and scenes I wanted to add, but my best friend Eric Daniels was sick of hearing about this idea. He suggested I trim some songs so I could actually finish this project. He also suggested I record the whole soundtrack so I could see the shape of the film from start to finish.

Once I did that, I started animating my favorite scenes. So there would be a scene followed by black, followed by a scene, followed by a long stretch of black and on and on. The black areas bothered me enough to animate secondary scenes to plug the holes. After awhile the only holes left were dialogue shots that had seemed boring to me, but now in the context of the scenes surrounding them, they took on more meaning. I could now throw in body language that made the dialogue have subtext.