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.

Ralph and Louie

Viewers of The Dream Hat either like Ralph and Louie the best, or think it is deeply sacrilegious.  I don't consider Ralph and Louie sacrilegious because at the end they realize "paradise is everywhere".  Ralph and Louie got their names from slang for right and left.  When I was younger people would give directions, "Go down a block and hang a ralph.  Go down another block and hand a louie."

Ralph and Louie represent people who agree on the fundamentals and fight to the death over insignificant details.  

There are three major western religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Muslim.  They all share the Ten Commandments and yet they are constantly at war.  I like the old story of the blind men and the elephant.  One blind man holds the elephant's trunk and declares, "The elephant is a snake".  One blind man holds the elephant's leg and declares, "The elephant is a tree."  One blind man holds the elephant's tail and declares,  "The elephant is a rope."  None of these blind men can experience the whole elephant at once.  If they fought the other blind men because they thought their limited point of view was the right one and everyone else was wrong, they would be like Ralph and Louie.  Nobody can see all of the elephant.  You have to be bigger than the elephant and have your sight.

And nobody can see all of God (or whatever you want to call that undefinable spirit) and to think you can is highly egotistical, arrogant, and probably blasphemous.  We all can see a piece of it. 

There was an old pop psychology book "I'm OK, You're OK" by Thomas Harris that popularized transactional analysis.  I'm very visual and I liked the chart it had, that broke down personal philosophy to its' simplest components.  This pretty well boils down every philosophy the world has created.

I'm Ok, You're Not OK:

I'm right and everything about you is wrong and if you take it to the logical extreme, it justifies murder in your mind.

I'm Not OK, You're OK:

You are right and everything about me is wrong and if you take it to the logical extreme, it justifies suicide in your mind.

I'm Not Ok, You're Not OK:

Everyone is all wrong and if you take it to the logical extreme, it justifies murder/suicide.

I'm OK, You're Ok:

Everyone's point of view is worth considering and has some validity.  Taken to its logical extreme, it is live and let live and we all survive.

This is why I threw in the line by Ralph and Louie, "You've got to choose a side, son.  Homicide.  Suicide."  By finding the differences between us, you are killing a part of humanity.  By finding what we have in common, we can build on our experience and grow.

My Review of Soldier In The Rain (EST-MOD)

WB Shop

His own soda pop machine. Air conditioning. The finest cotton underwear. Someone else doing the work. That’s M/Sgt. Maxwell Slaughter’s (Jackie Gleason) game – and man, can he play it. Just ask Supply Sgt. Eustis Clay (Steve McQueen), who idolizes the big, shrewd, supremely self-confident older man...

Soldier In The Rain (EST-MOD)

My Favorite Steve McQueen Movie

Hammination Petalluma, California 6/5/2009

 

5 5

Pros: Entertaining, High Production Value, Engaging Characters, Original

Describe Yourself: Movie Buff

This was Jackie Gleason's best screen role, even better than Minnesota Fats. This movie was in a lot of ways like the great Warners cartoon with the little dog worshipping the big bulldog. Gleason was the bulldog and McQueen was the little dog. Long before the Fonz, Gleason had a magic touch with a coke machine. It was also reminiscent of some of the best episodes of Sgt. Bilko. I laughed and cried at this movie and am so glad that it is finally on DVD. Great adaptation of the book, although because of screen censorship, the last line of the book couldn't be said by McQueen. Just imagine if he could have said it. This is also my favorite Steve McQueen movie. I like it even more than Bullitt.

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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.