Design for Dreaming
1956 · 10 min
Best-known of the films presenting “Motorama,” General Motors’ annual traveling automobile and appliance trade show. This example introduces the 1956 automobile models, Frigidaire’s “Kitchen of Tomorrow,” electronic highways of the future, and GM “dream cars” the Oldsmobile Golden Rocket and the…
This film has an audio description track, written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. There is nothing to switch on — the description is in the film’s own sound, so pressing play is the whole of it.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
Is Design for Dreaming public domain? The rights evidence — the copyright registration, the renewal search and the sources we checked, written out in full so you can check them too.
Watch it here
This is our restoration, with the audio description track mixed in. There is nothing to switch on: press play and the description is in the sound. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is counted.
Sound only — 17 MB rather than 746 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
Or watch it with the picture:
The same film without description, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Every film here that carries audio description — what description is, who it is for, and how ours are made.
How this print was restored
This copy of Design for Dreaming was restored here, from a print that had been through a good deal before it reached us. The work finished on 2026-09-06. Every step is listed below, because a re-encode passed off as a restoration is worth nothing and the only way to tell them apart is to say what was done.
- 66 audio description cues, Kokoro am_michael at 161 wpm, written against the frames and seated by measured length in pauses measured from four transcripts by word timing, 0 collisions and 0 over speech; 49% coverage, 6.9 cues a minute; description ducked 10.0 dB under narration; delivery mix -16.8 LUFS / -2.0 dBTP; description track flagged default+visual_impaired+descriptions and verified louder in 12 of 12 cue windows; captions 0 faults across 67 cues; title card joined without re-encoding the picture
The print we started from is here, so the before and after can be compared.