Triad Pictures

Dream (trailer) from Nate Atkinson on Vimeo.

Produced by Andrew Cottingham.

Since the movie took place during Christmas eve and needed snow for a lot of the scenes, almost all of the outdoor scenes needed to be filmed when the weather conditions were just right, which really sucked to film.

Nathan started to grow his hair longer about 2 or 3 months into the filming, and then he got it cut which wasn't actually as big a continuity error as I thought it would be.

Although it took us a span of 5 and a half months to film the short, we only actually were filming for about 17-20 hours.

Originally, the story was going to focus more on just the bizarre dreams and there wasn't going to be as much story line about the affair and all the other things that came from it. But I thought that the dreams would not work if they weren't in some kind of context, so the story about Jennifer and Andy was made to support the dreams, and that became much more interesting to me. So I decided then to change the focus of the story to that, instead of the dreams.

You would be surprised at how out of order we filmed some of the scenes. I basically always carried the script with me when I went over to the Atkinsons just in case we had time to film a quick scene here or there.

When Steve tells Nathan about the tainted food, we pretty much adlibbed the lines and just about every time I tried to think of some different word to use for diarrhea, and as a result, none of us (nic included) could ever keep going with it and we ended up doing about 8 takes.

This really is the most serious subject matter that Triad Pictures has ever tried to film.

The two movies whose style I looked at most closely were Vanilla Sky and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Both movies contained not only a destructive love in the story, but some very nightmarish scenes as well.

For the final dream/nightmare, I wanted to glamorize Nathan killing Andy, and do basically the opposite for the scenes of Nathan killing Jennifer. For Andy's scenes, I wanted the camera to move a lot and look more like some kind of action movie where the bad guy finally gets killed, and for Jennifer, I just really wanted it to be more simple and real.

Jennifer, Andy, and Nathan were all really good sports the entire time and really trusted me when I don't think they quite knew what I was doing or even what the final product was going to look like, which was and is really appreciated.