dream sweeper download trailer
2003-2005
dream sweeper, a film that brendan bellomo and japhy riddle wrote, directed and animated, was exhibited at lincoln center. in december 2004, it screened with the 60-piece nyu symphony orchestra performing an original, live score by composer tiffany wu and conducted by chien-nien chen. japhy riddle and brendan bellomo collaborated on the stop motion animation, sound design, and editing for the film, while brendan worked on the digital animation to this science fiction short.
synopsis:
a robot janitor discovers artistic refuge within the oppressive world of a mysterious ocean metropolis. the film’s miniature sets and characters, constructed from found objects and electronic parts, were animated using stop motion techniques. these elements were coupled with digital animation accomplished in lightwave 3d throughout the 16-month production.
the production:
japhy and brendan started this production in 2002 without any idea what the story would be about. they only knew that we wanted to create another world: mysterious and oppressive.
"we created the train shots [see below (shot 8)] as the very first sequence in the film before there was a plot or even a main character. we shot with a canon xl1s and recorded directly to dv capture in adobe premiere in progressive scan. simultaneously, we did "video assist" to a video lunchbox. the lunchbox would capture a duplicate frame set that we could use for reference, pb, and ghosting when we needed to check out work in progress. before dream sweeper, we had finished our last stop motion film, insect transfer, in just 15 hours. we had no idea that dream sweeper would end up taking over 3,000 man-hours!
we both animated (moved around physical pieces) and captured (pressed the frame advance on lunchbox and pc); we would trade off from day to day. to create the diverse environment of the water city and the surrounding area, we built 25 sets. some took over 8 hours to create and were about 4'x6' while others were quite simple. but, they were all made without the use of glue or adhesives, so we could strike them and re-use the components for other sets. one down side was that the sets were very easy to knock over. we shot over 90 shots with stop motion.
the next step was digital animation. we soon realized that we needed to couple digital animation into the production in order to achieve the look we wanted. this made complex effects and nuanced animation possible. we animated just over 15,000 frames for this film throughout the intense 16 month production. the film's digital elements were all created from scratch. no presets, textures, particle behaviors, or existing models were used. the result of which was over 100,000 object, scene, image and texture files. it was the first time i [brendan] had used the advanced particle effects in lightwave known as volumetrics, and we ended up employing them heavily for the explosions, smoke, water, dust, and various particles through out the film. in order to merge the stop motion with the cgi animation, we used detailed lighting matches, environment reflection mapping, shadow matching, and automated digital color grading to composite the two types of visual elements together. an extensive amount of rotoscoping was done to paint out hands and add effects like motion blur to the moving characters. everything was rendered on a intel pentium iii dual 800 mhz, and two intel pentium 4 2.26 ghz workstations with professional animation graphics cards."
post production: sound design
japhy and brendan spent about two months sound designing dream sweeper. we used just two mics and did almost no location recording. everything was tracked right in my bedroom into sonic foundry's sound forge xp and calkwalk sonar xp. we tracked over 20 hours of sounds to be mixed down to just 8 minutes. there is only one sound the was "canned." but, that's a secret.
we recorded everything from tea kettles, salad spinners, light bulbs, cd-rom drives, explosions, water, and styrofoam pellets to create the sounds for the industrial metropolis in the film. we used sound forge extensively to process the tracks that were recorded direct to disc with a shure sm 58 and an akg c 1000 s. by employing a great deal of pitch and time manipulation, as well as multi-tracking and some vocal sound effects, we created a whole world of sound to sell the story; which ultimately is about musical expression.
post production: the score
composer and nyu graduate student tiffany wu wrote a fantastic full length score for for the lincoln center screening. composer and nyu graduate student chien-nien chen did a marvelous job conduction the 15 piece ensemble of nyu musicians at the walter reade theatre for an audience of around 250 people. dream sweeper was excellently received at lincoln center. it was accompanied by graduate and senior thesis films from tisch's film/tc production program.
support:
we would not have been able to finish this challenging project without help from out friends. victor bellomo provided invaluable and continual support with script development, visual feedback, and editing advice. our fourth grade teacher, roger ganas, loaned us some great circuit boards for set design and my friend and calculus tutor, emile bruneau, gave me a headlight cover from his restored ford model a that we used as a skylight. alex klaiber mastered the dvds in apple dvd studio pro for us. nicki, robin's dog, ran onto the set one day and almost destroyed the days work. i had to painstakingly rotoscope her out!