What is DREAMCASTING? Dreamcasting is a collaborative animation project edited together into an experimental narrative. Animators were given the prompt of "mid-90s 3D video games" and created elaborate short animated sequences to be edited together into a nostalgic audiovisual hallucination. Somehow along the way, a story formed about regret, nostalgia, and how art tied to technology will be left behind when the technology is outmoded. Before movies, my first artistic loves were the video games I grew up with from the mid to late 90s. By the time I was old enough to play them, they were already outmoded things, left in the dust as technology marched on. Video games are an ephemeral medium, as any art tied to technology is. The art is disposable, to be abandoned, left to fall apart, and forgotten. The aesthetics of these games– the harsh polygons, crusty pixelated textures, the blur of low-resolution video– are abrasive limitations of technology. These games, looking back upon them, are incredible to me… Art, straining at the limits of its medium, fighting to get out.

What is Dreamcasting, the film, about? It all began with an idea. In the mid-90s, a small tech startup, Dream Inc., aimed to change the world by developing their console hardware, the “Dream Machine.” Coupled with its groundbreaking low-poly games, visionary founders, and guerilla strategy to take on the giants of Nintendo, Sega, and Sony Computer Entertainment, there was no way the Dream Machine would ever fail… until it did. After the company terminated its employees and shuttered its doors, the mountains of consoles sitting behind those locked gates began to rust and rot away, except for one. With a bit of life left in its circuitry, the machine boots up and begins exploring the games it intended to provide its users. But as the computer becomes self-aware and recognizes its failure and solitude, the hardware starts to crash. Then, after moments of calm, the computer reboots and begins to realize and accept its obsolescence. All its memories and software mash and meld together and forms a digital skeleton of itself in a desert of the old. As it stands in the graveyard of what it once was, the A.I. looks out into the horizon, born anew.