Dream Journal 2024-01-26: New Concoctions By Fish Davidson!
It's been a long time since I had a dream-based invention, but before we get to the explanation of this thing, let's talk about the
Dream Fragments
I was eating nachos, but instead of jalapenos to go with my sour cream, cheese, and beans, there were tiny cats. Completely normal (and alive) cats, except each one was no larger than my thumbnail. I thought it was unusual to eat them, but those were the nachos I had at hand and I wasn't going to let them go to waste.
Main Dream: Behind The Scenes Of Nissan's New Commercial
Note: the videos in this post have flashing/strobing effects.
The entirety of this dream was basically an in-depth look at a commercial for a new car by Nissan. The car is not important, and I recall pretty much nothing about the car other than it being a sedan that looked like any other modern sedan, and I think it was red.
What is important is the practical effects the commercial employed for the vaguely sci-fi bits (because cars can't be cutting edge without being from The Future). There was a white room that textured with lines of filaments the thickness of uncooked spaghetti noodles, and inside this room was a pedestal with a circular holographic projector on top that broadcast the headshot view of some alien from outer space who looked like a cross between a dog and a stag.
Instead of using a guy in a costume for the alien, the commercial used a special zoetrope to provide the animation for the alien's speech. The original zoetrope used a sequence of still images arranged in a strip that in turn spun around a cylinder to give the illusion of movement. Here's a video that describes a newer variety of zoetrope (though there is a discussion and example of the original zoetrope at the 1-minute mark of the video).
The variety of zoetrope that the commercial creatives used was a step beyond the ones show in the prior video. Instead of using multiple rotations of the cylinder/platter to show a repeating animation, the commercial used multiple nested platters that could rotate independently of each other and could also rotate in different directions.
You can hopefully understand how the device is constructed by looking at my crudely-drawn diagram in the header image of this post. I drew a dog instead of an alien because it wouldn't look anything like it did in the dream, and most people can intuitively recognize a poorly-drawn dog.
Apparently I was one of the people who worked on the commercial, because I had a lot of access to the props and stuff on the set. I spent a long time playing with the zoetrope, too, which is how I was able to recall its construction.
Each platter contains variations of a different part of the alien's head. The outermost platter contains different positions for the alien's mouth, lips, and tongue. The middle platter contains a smaller number of positions that account for blinking and small movements of the upper/lower eyelid. On the smallest platter is the back part of the head and it controls small movements in the position of the ears.
Because each platter is controlled by motors that can rotate forward or backward, it can play play an animation of effectively unlimited duration as long as you can move the platters into position quickly (and precisely) enough. The "holographic projector" was really this special zoetrope, and it was controlled in such a way that the movement of each platter made it look like the alien was talking about wanting to purchase the car (though the actual dialog would presumably be added during post-production). It gave the alien a cool stop-motion look when the platters were spinning.
Lastly, the final version of the commercial used Powerman 5000's song, "When Worlds Collide" as its soundtrack. My wife happened to have that song as her alarm when the dream was happening, but it was muffled by the bedsheets and didn't wake me up immediately. Instead, the song just crept seamlessly into the dream. Below is the official music video for that song, which I'm including because it's a good song and also because I forgot it had sci-fi and aliens in it.
Nissan, if you're reading this, I am willing to license this technology to you. Call me and let's talk.