Editor’s note
I cannot tell you how DREAMCAT found me. I don’t have social media, and the morning of our call I was still trying to remember who sent it. What I do remember is the behind-the-scenes video. Something clicked, and when something makes me feel something, I pursue it.
People need to know what happened to this film after the shoot, when the one they thought they had quietly turned into a different one. That is the story a press release cannot tell, and it is the reason this series exists.
When I saw a studio in Düsseldorf and an animator in Brussels spend almost three years on a film combining live action and hand-drawn animation, then throw away two weeks of that drawing because it wasn’t true to the man on screen, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a while. Then I met them, on a Friday night at nine o’clock their time, beers in hand, and I couldn’t believe it either.
This is what I’m Having a Breakdown is for. Danny, Joost and Jakob opened the drawers: the plates, the scrapped monster, the Jedi shot that got cut down, the raw drawings and the finished frames. Here is the film they made, and the one they didn’t.
The making of DREAMCAT. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
The monster that wasn’t his
Joost Jansen had spent roughly two weeks animating a monster for a film about himself. Then he said it did not belong there.
Director Daniel “Danny” Bartels had been bracing for that conversation. Two weeks of drawing were in the cut, and he was still working out how to raise it without hurting his friend. He never had to. After one of the project’s long breaks, it was Joost who came back and said the monster wasn’t working.
DREAMCAT began as a portrait of Joost, made by MAKE MAMI PROUD in Düsseldorf, with live action and his own hand-drawn animation. Danny’s first story was a classic hero’s journey. A dark creature takes over parts of the artist’s life, Joost regains his strength in the woods, and his characters help him defeat it. Dreamcat, the round-headed figure the film is named for, would show up in exactly one shot, the last one, for the rescue.
The December 2023 offline edit was built around a dark demon. Danny had asked for an octopus, something that would get its grip on Joost. Joost drew a slimy hybrid of a moth and an octopus, pink-spotted and tentacled, and brought it to life. Then everyone watched the cut. The monster was revealed too early, it sat in the wrong place in the story, and it had become an insect-spider mix too complex to animate well. Most of all it had nothing to do with Joost.
“I felt that I needed to translate the concept of a ‘demon’ into characters from my own creative universe.”
Joost Jansen
The studio’s first instinct was to swap in something more abstract, a dark smoke creature that could be animated freely and placed anywhere. Joost had a better idea. He went back to his sketchbooks and looked for the characters that kept showing up on their own. There was Dreamcat, of course, always there. There was a woman with a round head, his feminine side. There was a child, the one who opens the film wearing a half-Dreamcat helmet, his inner child. And there was the achievement-driven macho, the boss who chases him about deadlines.
“Each represents an inner voice within me: the child within, my feminine side, and the achievement-driven macho. Each functions as a kind of demon, capable of getting me into trouble or guiding me towards enlightenment.”
Joost Jansen
In March 2024 the monster was scrapped for good. Dreamcat moved from the last shot to the lead role, not the rescuer at the end but the hero beside Joost for the whole film. A story about defeating something foreign became what Joost had always been drawing: a balancing act with the voices in his own head, the ones that fuel him and the ones that overwhelm him, which are the same ones.
“For me, the biggest breakthrough came when I introduced my recurring alter egos into the film. Suddenly, everything fell into place.”
Joost Jansen
DREAMCAT, the abandoned monster in an early forest composite. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
Getting Joost in front of the camera
The name came before the studio. About ten years ago, editor Philipp Schneider proposed MAKE MAMI PROUD as a joke with a dare inside it. When Danny finally founded the company in 2021, with Schneider and producer Isabel Ley, Philipp worried the name was too old. They decided it could still be a promise: if the work was brave enough, the irony would hold.
Danny had come up as a Motion Designer after graduating in 2010, directing VFX-heavy music videos on weekends. He met Jakob Saretz in 2014 at Congaz, and they bonded over those videos and over techno. In 2021 a Dr. Oetker commercial introduced Danny to Joost, a Brussels cel animator who draws, in his words, “to observe, explore, and make sense of the world around me.” Danny remembers a nightmare client and a great time working with Joost. Jakob joined MMP in 2022, working across Motion Design and compositing, and Joost became the studio’s permalancer for the German market.
That first job together also left a character behind. Danny traces DREAMCAT’s sergeant to the creative director on the Dr. Oetker commercial, who kept asking whether the flamingos looked happy enough. As Danny puts it: “Our first shared enemy — and apparently he stayed with us.”
The studio had been making artist portraits for brands the usual way: an interview, a workbench, a voice explaining process. Danny wanted the opposite, a portrait from the inside out, where the artist’s inner world was drawn rather than described. He knew exactly who he wanted to film, and exactly how that person would answer.
“When Daniel first suggested making a film about me, my initial reaction was: What a terrible idea. Why would you want to film me? I’m not that interesting.”
Joost Jansen
So Danny pitched it without the interviews. They would simply visit Joost’s places, the studio, the forest, his happy place in the woods, and let his own characters flood in. One rule governed everything that followed, including the monster: Joost was the client.
“The most important thing for me was that Joost would never feel ashamed or cringe watching the final film. He should feel good seeing himself in it, feel it was honest to who he is, and have the space to express himself.”
Daniel “Danny” Bartels
That was Danny’s test for the film, and it gave Joost’s discomfort with the monster real weight.
Joost trusted him, and somewhere under the reluctance he felt the pull of stepping outside his comfort zone. He said yes. The three of them had ended one drunken night showing each other their personal projects and agreeing the studio needed one of its own. This was it.
Three nights in Brussels
They shot in September 2023: three days in Brussels, mostly at night and in the early morning, plus one underwater day in a pool in Mülheim an der Ruhr. The crew was small and young. MMP is not a film production company, and the shoots it had done before were the easy kind, in a studio, with daylight.
The forest taught them the difference. A lighting setup Danny had budgeted at thirty minutes took four hours. By the time the lights were where they needed to be, the quiet scenes were gone: Joost walking after his run, discovering his demons one at a time, the slow private moments between a man and the characters only he can see.
DREAMCAT, the forest plate, animation pass and final composite. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
Danny remembers leaving the shoot deeply disappointed. They had missed so many of the images he wanted that he wondered whether they could make a film from what remained.
The scene that hurt most was the rescue. Several shots had been planned with a stand-in on set, to be painted over as Dreamcat in post, including one where Dreamcat saves Joost. Those shots became full animation instead, with placeholders dropped into the preview edits. Only when Danny saw a cut with the placeholders in and could imagine how it would play did he believe in the film again.
The bill came later. Danny turned about five planned paint-over shots into full animation, a decision that added roughly ten days of drawing for Joost. His verdict is unsentimental: a larger, more experienced camera and lighting crew would have saved money and frustration. He would only do it again with the right people on board from the start.
The breakdown
Jakob’s job across the whole film was the same: glue live-action plates and hand-drawn animation into one composite, and merge Joost’s style with the footage so the film holds a single look. Joost describes the handoff with less ceremony.
“I throw things at Jakob in a kind of frenzy. My work is often raw and direct, and Jakob knows how to distil it into something more legible and balanced.”
Joost Jansen
The passes make that collaboration visible. A drawing arrives with its own energy. Tracking, focus, color and light decide how that energy lives in the shot.
Joost describes the film this way: “Physical and mental spaces constantly overlap, which gives it a somewhat delirious quality.”
The forest
The film opens in the woods, and the woods had to feel like Joost’s head. Jakob generated a depth pass from the footage with the Quick Depth 3 plugin and matched it to a 3D camera in After Effects, which let him rebuild the depth of field of the entire scene in post. The focus trembles, mirroring Dreamcat’s madness, and because the drawn characters share that focus with the plate, they sit inside it instead of on top of it. Compare the plain comp with the final and watch what happens between the figures and the trees.
“DREAMCAT gave us room to try techniques that tight commercial schedules rarely allow, to push our compositing of cel animation and live action further.”
Jakob Saretz
Joost’s drawing changes approach shot by shot. Some footage is rotoscoped, some illustrations are animated traditionally, and some camera moves are animated or tracked. Where the animation has to lock into the live action he draws on ones, a new drawing for every frame. Where the scene needs balance more than integration, he animates on threes.
“Making this film reminded me once again that I’m not someone who likes taking shortcuts. I feel that I can express myself most authentically through the actual frame-by-frame process.”
Joost Jansen
DREAMCAT, the forest shot in four passes, from live-action plate to final composite. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
The studio
Drawn animation and live-action footage speak different visual languages, because each follows its own logic of light. A character painted in saturated purple needs a relationship with the light on a photographed desk. Jakob’s answer was to make the footage meet the drawings halfway.
“On several shots we used the After Effects plugin to relight the plates so they appeared lit by Joost’s illustrations.”
Jakob Saretz
The plugin was AI Relight. The six stages of this shot follow a sketchbook on Joost’s desk, from the raw plate through the animated illustration, Joost’s character pass, the first comp, the light and glow pass, and the final frame. Watch the paper and the desktop as Dreamcat’s torch flares. The drawn light starts to land on photographed surfaces, and the room responds to something that was never in it.
DREAMCAT, six stages of the sketchbook shot, from the original desk to the final torchlight. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
The ending
The ending they shot had Joost leaving his atelier, walking down the street, and joining his characters in one last wide shot. The camera would pan up to the sky. Title. Credits.
Once the offline edit was locked, Jakob sent Joost the three shots that make up the sequence. The studio painted every sign and piece of trash out of the plates. Joost animated every element of the scene, drawing them flat, 3D-tracking them into the footage himself, and handing it all back as a slap comp in After Effects. Jakob rearranged elements so the viewer wouldn’t get lost, then tracked, masked, tweaked color, glow and depth of field, added a colored zebra crossing to the first shot, and relit the plate so the characters cast light onto the cobblestones.
He was still finishing those three shots when Joost changed the ending.
“The old ending was a classic, old-school film ending: a pan up to the sky, then the credits. It all felt like something we had seen many times before, and we had the sense that it didn’t do the film justice.”
Jakob Saretz
Joost’s replacement is a fighter jet. It bursts out of the street toward the camera with every character aboard, close enough to read their faces.
DREAMCAT, the original sky ending and two frames from the revised plane sequence. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
“Your demons are really your best friends. They are part of you and can be both positive and negative. Enjoy each other, and enjoy yourself.”
Joost Jansen
The idea, design and animation of the plane are entirely Joost’s. Jakob adjusted the colors and added depth of field to guide the eye through a busy scene. The new ending shortened the last wide shot, so the elements he had just placed had to be rearranged once more. The wide shot had made the characters tiny. The plane let the film show their emotions one last time, up close.
DREAMCAT, four versions of the ending, from the street footage to the finished plane sequence. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
The new ending was part of a larger edit Joost made while Jakob was away on three months of parental leave in 2025. Before leaving, Jakob had pushed toward a solid version of the film. When the three of them reviewed Joost’s cut in September, he could see what the break had made possible.
“While I was away, Joost had made a few important tweaks to the edit: a new intro, some new shots, and finally an ending that felt right. I felt new energy and motivation, and the film felt like it was in its final form.”
Jakob Saretz
The edit gave Danny another problem to solve. It had the right mood, but no dramatic arc or real conclusion. The team briefed 2WEI Music, and the composition by Niklas Vinken gave the story the structure it needed. For Danny, it was a goosebump moment: “It made the story work and lifted every emotion we’d been hoping for.”
Making the Jedi shot smaller
One of the most revealing comparisons is a shot they reduced. After Joost comes out of the water with new energy, the team had planned a moment of power in the forest: moonlight, floating rocks, a hero shot built in 3D that they nicknamed the Jedi shot. The work-in-progress runs just under four seconds. The final shot runs 2.4.
DREAMCAT, the finished shot’s opening, the earlier rock effect and the final composite. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
Danny judged the shot by what Joost was feeling at that point in the story.
“It just felt out of place — too much like a show-off 3D shot, candy for a future reel. It wasn’t in the right mood for that moment in the film. It’s a quiet moment of regaining strength and thinking clearly, of finding motivation again. Not a maximum-power moment.”
Daniel “Danny” Bartels
The rocks still float in the finished version. The moment just passes more quickly. A breakdown usually tells you how an effect was built. This one tells you why they pulled it back, and that having made something elaborate did not oblige them to keep it.
DREAMCAT, the earlier Jedi shot and the shorter final cut. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
What “every frame by hand” means here
The project page says it in capitals: NO AI. EVERY FRAME BY HAND. It sits beside a film that uses AI-assisted compositing tools, so I asked the team to define the scope precisely. A claim like that deserves to be checked, and the answer is more interesting than the slogan.
Joost drew the film’s cel animation by hand. Jakob says that, as more of MMP’s client projects involved AI, DREAMCAT became a welcome return to their traditional workflow and to the way Joost works. Along the way they tried quick AI-generated layouts in the edit. Danny remembers the initial excitement fading when the results did not feel authentic to the film.
Where AI does appear in the finished film is in compositing. Jakob identifies AI Relight and Quick Depth as tools used on the shots. His distinction is between that technical processing and generating imagery or animation.
DREAMCAT, the sketchbook before and after the torchlight is added. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
“Every drawn frame in DREAMCAT is made by hand. AI was only used as a technical tool in compositing and never used to generate imagery or animation.”
Jakob Saretz
That statement is about the drawn animation. DREAMCAT also contains live-action photography and 3D work, and saying the whole film was drawn by hand would miss the collaboration the passes show. For Danny, the film had to be recognizable as Joost’s, made in a way that felt true to him. Joost puts it more simply.
“For me it means that a great deal of personal sweat has gone into the film. It is a human, personal film, made through human energy and connection.”
Joost Jansen
What it cost
Studios rarely say what a passion project costs. MMP tracks its time, so Danny opened the books.
Joost worked nearly 50 days on the film, and the studio was able to pay him for half of that time. The team recorded 532 hours excluding Joost, with Jakob’s 190 hours included in that total. The studio made room for the project during paid working hours, while Joost also contributed time it could not cover.
The film fitted into gaps between client projects, which is why there were so many breaks and why some lasted months. Danny says those breaks helped him see when the work was heading in the wrong direction and recover the motivation to change it. Jakob calls it a marathon, not a sprint, with one warning every studio should write down: you cannot run without a finish line forever. Festival submissions finally gave them that deadline. The final online version was delivered in August 2026, almost three years after the shoot.
Danny’s advice is shorter. Just do it. On a tight budget, plan with boards and an animatic so you can see whether it works before you start drawing. Work with people you love working with and know inside out. Talk about it a lot, make it a shared goal, and keep it alive even when it hurts.
Coming out from behind the drawings
On our call, Jakob said something I wrote down: the best way to destroy a good idea is to show it to many people and ask for their opinion. The three kept the creative decisions between them. The rest of the studio got updates, but almost no one saw the film while it was taking shape.
For Joost, the moment that defined it was the shoot he never wanted to do. Playing himself in front of a camera forced him to look at how he presents himself, and how he presents his work in relation to who he is. He calls it confronting and liberating in the same breath, and admits what the film taught him: it would be a shame to stay hidden in the shadows.
For Danny, the stakes were different this time. “I’d done plenty of passion projects on my own in the past, but this was the first under the company flag — so I pushed myself to make it worth it and make it special.”
“After events like OFFF or Us By Night, Jakob, Joost and I always ended up in the same conversation: that we have to push further if we ever want to tell our own success story, and that nobody is going to hand us anything. We have to do it ourselves to build the kind of momentum and attention that might lead somewhere bigger — to a position where we can actually choose which clients and projects we work with, and which we don’t.”
Daniel “Danny” Bartels
They returned to those conversations after hard, high-pressure client jobs, talking about their Dreamcat baby and how to keep feeding it. There were also periods when Danny needed the others to keep it moving.
“And I gained a lot of respect for Jakob and Joost, because they never gave up or lost motivation for this film — even in the periods when I was burned out and had lost mine. It was good that we kept each other going. After finishing it and finally releasing it, we felt satisfied and free in a way none of us had in a long time.”
Daniel “Danny” Bartels
The film is also a message to anyone who has drawn something only to have a client email land on top of it. There is a shot in DREAMCAT where Joost is trying to draw and the feedback pops up and he is simply furious. Jakob’s gloss on it: we feel you, you’re not alone. Everyone walks the two paths, the client work that pays and the work that is yours, and the base of all the other work is the voice you refuse to lose.
I keep coming back to the monster. Two weeks of drawing, and the man who drew it was the one to say it did not belong. That decision gave Joost room to bring more of himself into a film he had barely wanted to appear in. Danny hopes the next passion project might take a year instead of three. The film has given him a reason to want another one.
“I think what makes the film special is that it grew out of a shared desire to create. That spirit should never be lost: find fulfilment in the act of making itself.”
Joost Jansen
And Mami? I asked whether she was proud. Jakob said they were trying. Always.
DREAMCAT, outtakes from the shoot. Courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.
Credits
Film: DREAMCAT
Production: MAKE MAMI PROUD, Düsseldorf
Director: Daniel Bartels
Cast and animation: Joost Jansen
Lead artist: Jakob Saretz
DOP: Jan Heinrich
Editor: Philipp Schneider
Production team: Paula Revers, Quentin Abschlag, Thorben Winkler, Mario Da Silva
Music: 2WEI Music
Music composition: Niklas Vinken
Music supervision: Jan Salander
VFX: Quentin Abschlag, Isabel Käppele, Till König
Light: Thorben Winkler
Grading: Moritz Bastian
SFX and mix: Dario Albiez
Text: Manuel Iljitsch
Film and breakdown material courtesy of MAKE MAMI PROUD and Joost Jansen.