Why Dream Trader?

Why Dream Trader?

Ever since I was a kid I have always been interested in many different areas of different things. My earliest memories are of me taking my electric toys, opening them and taking the inside pieces to make something different. Electric cars were my favourite, since they have little motors to make the wheels move; I would take these motors and make things like a battery powered ship with a bottle of plastic using the lid of a can attached to the motor as a propeller. Another one was a blender, which worked fine, but the fact that it was made with an old plastic bottle didn’t make the food look edible.

By that time I didn’t know I was making electronics, figuring out simple circuits by myself and finding mechanical ways to make things do other things. From that I became interested in physics and math, but after I felt happy doing those things I wanted to discover something else. I moved into sports, entering a swimming class and spending the next three years doing it almost every day, until I decided I wanted to try something else, so I chose tennis. I played in a few children tournaments during those extra two years practicing tennis, I never won first places but I did get a few awards, but then, again, I wanted to try something else, and so soccer and basketball came in. In secondary school I joined the soccer team of my school, we were terrible, but it was the most fun part of the week to go out and play in the local interschool matches. I became a decent basketball and soccer player until I decided it was getting a bit repetitive for me. Then it came time to change sports for something else, and I chose music. I joined a music class in my high school, choosing bass guitar because it was the only instrument that had only another student other than me and I would get more class time from the instructor (drums and guitar had 20 people each). I liked music since the beginning and started to practice more and more, making a band with my friends to go out and play at different places around the city. I became very good at it, winning with my friends a few band battles, and I realized that I was way better at music than I ever was at sports, so I decided to stick to it and started thinking about a career in music. This was my first duality about choosing a career, because maths and physics never left me, I was good at them, I entered different national contests getting good results, and I had a better understanding of science than most of my classmates. My best friend was the top of the class, and most of my friends were engineering prospects just like I was. I had about a year to decide if I was going to go for music or electrical engineering.

When it came the time to choose I was sure (in a way) that I was going to engineering but I saw all of the options offered in my school and I started to wonder. I thought I wanted to try something new, once again, and after a while I saw potential in the animation program, a new degree at my university at the time, and since then I have been immersed in that, four years now.

At this point in my life I still have that binary way of thinking of an engineer, but I’m also capable of switching to an artist’s mind. This is still a frustration at times, since I know I’m good naturally at math but I am also learning quite well how to be an animator.

This story is the essence of my film. Dream Trader is about finding what you want, recognizing your talents and vocation and doing it because that is what you were born with. I believe in genetics, and that we are all programmed with certain abilities and interests that we carry through out life, but sometimes people, like me, doubt about whether or not those abilities are the “best” or the “right” thing to do and try to do something else, thinking that what other people explore might be better.

This whole idea means a lot to me because I am still in that process of figuring out what I really am good at, because I understand music very well, just as well as physics, and at the same time I have a big heart for storytelling. Deep inside I know I am here by my own decision, because I always had a choice, and there was always something that didn’t want me to leave this to go back to my engineering desire. Maybe this is what I really want to do, ore maybe it is a combination of art and science where I’m going to land. Whatever it is, I still feel the need to finish this part of my life.

This last idea is another big important part of the film, and it is based on two similar thoughts:

-       Dreams are born from taste, and taste is born from genetics, but it’s discovered by experience.  This is a thought I came up with after thinking about all of these different decisions that I have made during my life. What it means is that our goal and out dreams are born from out own interests, our taste, whatever we like is the base for what we want to do in the future. Those interests and taste are embedded in us, we are born with them, our brain is ready to be adapted towards a certain path... but we are not born knowing what an animator is, or what an engineer is, we might have a creator’s mind or a problem solving mind, but it is until we grow up and we discover the world when we can find the use for that “taste” and until then we can say “I want to be an astronaut”

-       The second thought is an old Spanish saying that translates “no one knows what they have until it is seen lost”. This mean that we don’t appreciate what we have, we take things for granted, until we lose that thing and we realize that we always wanted to have it.

These two thoughts relate to the story of the old man in the film, as he ignores his own vocation thinking that he might find something else and better to do, until the death comes to visit him and takes his craft away and he realizes he cannot be happy without it, and decides to give his life away for one last chance of using his talent.

I’m am doing Dream Trader as a way to explore my own decisions and to express my preoccupation of finding our purpose in life to other people, because we all have something to say and something we can be the best at, we just have to find it, recognize, love it and put passion on it.