The Dream is a collaborative project that Sofie Lee and I began one year ago and work on it in our free time. We had had a good experience working together in the past and wanted to deepen this connection with a heightened level of quality and storytelling.

We both came from different countries and cultures with a hope to have better work opportunities and aspired to build a bright future for ourselves and our families. The Dream is the universal story of one’s struggle to balance reality and imagination. Sometimes, waking up and facing the real world, one is confronted with the many obstacles of achieving one’s dream. So, we retrieve psychologically in our dream, which may drive us to forget who we really are.

The dream is a new adventure that was expertly designed by Sofie Lee and which brought me out of my comfort zone. I lived with this project for a year and worked on it during my free time. Despite the 2D graphics aesthetic of the style frames, I decided to use 3D software as my main tool to animate most of the scenes. The remainder of the animation, compositing, and editing was executed in After Effects. I found Cinema4D to be a great tool for such a complicated animation because it allowed me to manage and animate all of its exquisite details. Each scene brought with it a new challenge as new transitions involved a lot of problem-solving. Every time I found a good solution, it was like I winning a stage in a race up a mountain. This is not unlike real life; a game in which we try to win each stage and go to the next one. Thus, each experience in our lives makes us stronger for tackling the next adventure and achieving our dream.