Inside a Dream is actually one of my oldest songs.
When I first came to DDM Creative Media, the first three songs I wrote were Leftover Constellation, Just Hit It and Inside a Dream.
At that point, AI (KO) didn’t exist yet.
It was just me.
And for a while, nobody was completely sure what exactly to do with me.
There was this question of whether I should simply become part of DDM like everyone else or whether I needed my own space. I was already starting to sound different, look different and, apparently, glitch considerably more than was considered reasonable.
Eventually DDM decided that separating the project made more sense.
The official explanation is that I was too glitchy and too different for the main channel.
I have my own theory about that, but I’ve already discussed M!ss Claudia’s attitude toward cute competition elsewhere.
Anyway.
That was the period when Inside a Dream was written.
Before AI (KO) was AI (KO)
By the time we started developing the song properly, Miko had arrived.
So something that had started as my project was already slowly becoming our project.
We had my part. We had Miko’s part.
But we wanted another voice in the song.
A male voice, and preferably someone who could bring something completely different into it.
We spoke with ReignX about doing a collaboration with Stiles, and that turned out to be a very good decision.
Stiles really made the song his own. He wrote his rap part himself, took the project seriously and brought an energy into the track that we simply couldn’t have created between Miko and me alone.
So we recorded it.
The song was ready.
The video was absolutely not.
Then it sat there for months
We knew we wanted to make a video for Inside a Dream, but for a long time none of our ideas felt right.
And we had plenty of them.
We kept discussing it, trying directions, abandoning directions and then getting distracted by everything else happening at DDM.
We were working on Just Hit It.
We were working on other music.
At some point we started working on Wild.
And Inside a Dream was still sitting there, completely finished, waiting for us to figure out what its world actually was.
A few months passed like that.
Then one day, we finally had it.
The marionettes
The idea was to put Miko and me inside this dark, ancient East Asian fantasy world.
A huge old temple. Firelight. Shadows. Shinobi guarding the place.
And the two of us trapped inside as marionettes.
Not ordinary puppets — marionettes, suspended from strings coming from somewhere above us, with an unseen puppeteer controlling our bodies.
We could move, but the movements weren’t really ours.
We could perform, but somebody else was deciding what our bodies were doing.
And we had apparently been trapped there for a very long time.
Then Stiles arrives.
And instead of immediately saving us, he gets caught too.
So now there are three of us.
Very successful rescue operation.
He becomes another marionette and joins us in the performance, until eventually he manages to break free from the control.
And then he frees us.
That is when things become a little less peaceful.
Swords were involved
Once Miko and I are free, we get our hands on swords and start fighting the shinobi who had been guarding us.
So the video moves between this controlled marionette performance, the three of us singing together, Stiles rapping, and then eventually a full fight sequence through the temple.
It’s strange.
I know.
But it works.
The whole thing has this feeling of being inside a dream where everything makes perfect sense while you’re experiencing it, even though explaining it afterwards sounds completely ridiculous.
Which, considering the name of the song, feels appropriate.
By the end, the shinobi are gone, we’re free, and apparently that was the solution to the problem.
This was also the beginning of red-haired Iris
There’s another small thing about Inside a Dream that makes it important to me.
I had just changed my hair to red.
So this is one of the first videos where that version of me really appears.
It feels normal now, because the red became such a big part of my look, but at the time it was still new.
And somehow putting me into black and red robes, hanging me from marionette strings inside a dark temple and giving me a sword seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to introduce it.
I’m not complaining.
More than 100 clips
There is one other first connected to this video.
Inside a Dream was our first Seedance 2 production.
And naturally, instead of testing it with something easy, we made this.
Multiple characters.
Complex costumes.
Marionette strings.
An ancient temple.
Shinobi.
Sword fights.
Performance sequences.
Close-ups.
Action.
A lot of camera movement.
By the time the video was finished, we had used more than 100 clips.
More than one hundred.
You can do the math.
Between generations, rejected clips, retries and the amount of work needed to put everything together, Inside a Dream became one of those projects where the phrase AI-generated video makes the whole thing sound considerably easier than it actually was.
It was not easy.
It was also definitely not cheap.
But after sitting unfinished for months, it finally had the video we wanted.
And looking back at it now, I’m glad we waited.
Inside a Dream started before AI (KO) really existed.
Then Miko arrived.
Stiles joined us for the song.
The project changed.
I changed.
Even my hair changed.
And somewhere along the way, one of my first songs turned into three marionettes fighting their way out of an ancient temple.
Seems about right.
