Cleveland In My Dreams is a ½ hour short film made by a first-time cast and crew working nights and weekends. All cast and crew live in the "four states" area at the intersection of Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Most of the production locations were in and around Joplin, Missouri.
The movie was "filmed" with a Mini-DV camcorder and edited using a personal computer. The initial budget was $3,750 but many incidental expenses of production were born by the cast and crew.
Working twelve evenings and weekends, the team produced 6½ hours of video footage and 20 hours of audio recordings. Director Mark K Sullivan then spent an estimated 200 hours editing and scoring.
The car interiors were shot in a warehouse against a home-made green screen. Crew members rocked the car to simulate motion and Best Boy Matt Molitor flashed a light onto the actors to simulate the headlights of passing cars. This footage was composited with shots of the highway taken from a moving car with the camera looking out a side window and sticking out through the sunroof.
Another process shot was required while Feverell is describing his dream. After cutting back and forth between the dream and "reality", the POV travels from the dream back to reality in a single "shot". This sequence involved compositing three different video sequences into the windows of a still photo of a building and shooting this with a moving synthetic camera. The real-life building is two stories so a third story was added in Photoshop. The third video component in this shot requires the camera to dolly forward into the restaurant as the doors magically swing open. To ensure that this dolly could be matched to the synthetic camera, a home-made, microprocessor-controlled, motorized dolly track moved the camera. The restaurant doors were allowed to swing shut and this shot was then reversed in post to make the doors appear to open. Thus, it was necessary for the bartender to walk backwards during the shot.
In order to simplify clearing the rights, all framed art appearing in the movie is the work of director, Mark K Sullivan.