Inside Adult Swim’s New Rotoscoped Sci-Fi Comedy 'Dream Corp LLC'

It’s no stretch of the imagination to envision technologists one day fighting over our minds’ waking and dream states. They likely won’t have to request access to our most private thoughts, either—as our smartphone addictions suggest, we'll serve them right up. In Adult Swim’s new, partially rotoscoped science fiction comedy series, Dream Corp LLC, this compulsion to plumb the depths of the mind gets explored by an unhinged technologist and a number of assistants, including a robot and unwitting patients.

“Once you start dreaming we will be able to guide you directly to where your issue is heading and rewire it,” the devious Dr. Roberts says to a nervous dream therapy patient. “Let’s calibrate you.”

As the trippy Dream Corp LLC trailer showcases, Dr. Roberts’ lab is a ramshackle operation. Housed in a mall falling into disrepair, it has the degraded, retro-futurist look Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and the underrated The Zero Theorem, while the sci-fi exists in the realm of lo-fi realism like Spike Jonze’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

In anticipation of the series’ October 23rd premiere on Adult Swim, we had a chance to talk to the series’ creator, Daniel Stessen, along with actor Jon Gries (Dr. Roberts), and Artbelly rotoscopers Jennifer Deutrom (Waking Life) and Michael Garza, who both worked on A Scanner Darkly. We talked about the humor in first generation technology, comedy in science fiction, and how the team builds the mind-bending rotoscoped sequences.

The Creators Project: Dream Corp LLC plays with some pretty interesting science fiction themes like virtual reality, dream hacking and immortality, but infuses them with comedy and runs it all through some very psychedelic rotoscoping. How did did this project come about?

Daniel Stessen (DS): When I was a kid, like 12 or so years old, I was having this reoccurring nightmare that actually made me afraid to go to sleep. It got to the point where one time I actually woke up in my next door neighbor’s, in his parent’s bedroom, screaming, “They’re coming, they’re coming, they’re coming!” The dad walks around the house with a shotgun in upstate New York with his shirt off, which he’s probably still doing, and my dad was like, “Okay, you probably need to see someone.”

So I went into a child therapist and he actually helped me figure out what this dream was about and I stopped having that dream. That, in combination with all of the advances in technology and singularity, and the advances in living cyborgs, allowed me to explore if something like Dream Corp LLC could be real. And I believe it can be.

It’s not too often that science fiction is successfully fused with comedy. Did you immediately think of the story as having this comedic manifestation?

DS: I intuitively lean toward comedy. A lot of times we have an idea of what the future is, and we all picture the future it’s this crisp, clean and beautiful thing but we never really explore how we got there. So the first generation of technology is very funny to me. Look at the first mobile phone, the Zach Morris phone, we laugh at that immediately because it’s funny. The same with first desktop computers or the first jump drive, which was five megabytes and had to be moved on a plane. First-generation technology is funny to me and I wanted to explore that and what can go wrong with it.

Right. And, in that way, the plot reminds me of the absurdity that is Silicon Valley tech bros trying to enhance their brains with nootropic drugs or other techniques that “hack” the brain.

Jon Gries (JG): Dr. Roberts’ whole aspiration was always to be the star of Silicon Valley. He believes in his technology so much that he has converted to cybernetics, and he’s lost his funding and is working out of a strip mall hoping to get out of the first gear. The way it was originally written in the pilot was that there was this company called Web Inc. that funded him and then pulled their funding. He’s now surviving on the fumes.

The mall owner wants to tear it down and sell it but there are no takers, so Dr. Roberts is lucky enough to be granted a stay of his execution. There are episodes coming where he’s pulling things apart and cleaning them and doing the necessary maintenance to keep everything going. And with T.E.R.R.Y. the robot, a breakdown is almost always around the corner. Dr. Roberts also has an eBay store and he takes Bitcoin.

Did you have an idea from the early stages that it the dream environments would have a rotoscoped look?

DS: Right from the beginning I wanted it rotoscoped. Michael and I worked on a short film right before this called The Gold Sparrow, and he and Jen both animated on A Scanner Darkly, and Jen also animated on Waking Life, which is still impressive to me. I remember getting a VHS tape of Waking Life years ago and it’s always been a form of endless possibilities for me.

These artists are so talented and they have such good taste. That hand-drawn quality gives it this human feeling and a breath to the world, which I was really interested in exploring. It just feels like you’re there and the actor feels like they’re right there with you. I thought it was a great way to explore the dreams.

These rotoscoped sequences are quite surreal and fantastical. Jon, did this impact your performance?

JG: We shot a pilot, or more like a presentational piece, and when I saw that it was really helpful when we shot these six episodes because I understood the theme and style of that animation. It helped me find the character when he’s in the dream, because Dr. Roberts is significantly more confident and at home with who he is and in control. So he tends to be more relaxed in the dream world, whereas he is a bit more frazzled and all over the place when he’s in the lab.

I get on that stage and we’re shooting in basically a bare space that has grids painted on it. There are people standing right there in frame with you with a fan because they’re going to get animated out, and you’re on a treadmill, and there is just something about when Daniel comes up and says, “Remember where you are.” The cameras are always moving in a beautiful, languid way, and you collect that and use that in your rhythm.

So there is a lot of crew action in frame that obviously isn’t being rotoscoped.

JG: Right. When we’re filming the grips can be standing there with lights, or if you have a sword and you swing it and you’re not supposed to have the sword anymore they will take it from you. But they’re in frame, in the actual shot when you’re filming—they’re just going to disappear when it goes into animation.

DS: We have one steadicam operator that is going all the time to give it this floating feeling. There is also this jib (crane) moving around to, again, make it feel like a dream. Michael, Jen and the Artbelly team rotoscope frame-by-frame, and that allows us to capture that camera movement.

Michael Garza (MG): Sometimes that camera movement could be beneficial, sometimes not when dealing with the animation with every keyframe.

What were the discussions like as far as what the look of the rotoscoped dream scenes?

MG: We had a good idea of what we wanted the characters look like, but we had to budget some things as far as being more efficient time-wise. So the style of the characters did evolve into a somewhat more simplistic look. But it kind of works because our backgrounds are so detailed that it all kind of melds together. It’s been an evolution in style.

DS: We always wanted to keep that painterly quality in mind. It’s a beautiful marriage between Artbelly and the other animation team that creates that whole dream look.

Jennifer Deutrom (JD): Also, we didn’t really have a ramp-up time to develop a style. They had already did the pilot before, so we already had that style. But you can see that over time the style changes, although it’s subtle. Also, the melding of the characters with the background, it’s gotten more fluid as we’ve learned to work with [the other animators]. They influenced us creatively, and we influenced them.

Have your rotoscoping techniques and processes evolved from A Scanner Darkly?

MG: In A Scanner Darkly it was, in my mind, very detailed animation. Here it was a bit more simplified stylistically, a little bit more base with our lines and shapes.

JD: I’ve been working in rotoscoping since the late 90s with Bob Sabiston. Even before A Scanner Darkly we did a short called Roadhead and Snack and Drink, so there are so many styles. I felt like this is sort of in that lineage. Dream Corp LLC is a bit different because the backgrounds are not rotoscoped. It adds a different dimension to the scenes that is interesting to me as an artist.

DS: The beautiful part is that the characters have this human quality and the backgrounds have a more computer element to them, which is a perfect meshing of Dr. Roberts’ world. He’s got the USB ports on his hands but he is going into your brain.

Dream Corp LLC premieres October 23rd at 11:45 PM ET on Adult Swim. Click here to learn more about the show.

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