High-def is not usually a source of inspiration, but in 2001 it was the stuff of Dreams. Dreams was a collection of eight stories told in Sony CineAlta 24P HD by some of the best directors in the industry, and it has since gone on to become a brand in its own right.

Yagoda says the idea for the project was born five years before. Though he claims not to be a techie, all the talk about HD in the late '90s prompted Yagoda and McCann-Erickson producer Peter Friedman to begin research. They eventually contacted Larry Thorpe, now SVP of marketing, Content Creation Division, Sony Electronics (before the company was a Y&R client), to find out how 24P HD could be applied by the ad industry.

Yagoda credits the idea for Dreams to a film he saw in 1972 by David Wolper called Visions of Eight, an eight-segment tribute to the Olympics done by the greatest directors of the time. Says Yagoda, "[HD] tends to be an engineering argument, you know. We talk about whether it's going to be high-def or film. We talk about things like interlace. That's when it started to occur to me: What if we give the technology to the good guys?" Unfortunately, the technology was too big and too rare at the time to be used practically, and the idea was shelved.

Early in the millennium, however, Lucas Films, Sony and Panavision developed a smaller more affordable camera for the new Star Wars series and the parameters changed. Yagoda decided to put the newly developed 24P camera into the hands of eight of the best directors he could find to see what they could do.

Although Yagoda was hopeful the technology would catch on, he wasn't thinking about it that way. "It's a tool. How can you say it's good or bad when no one is using it in our industry? We had this point of ignorance that had tremendous potential, and we weren't even looking at it."

Joy, the second installment of Dreams, screened at Cannes this year and is touring the globe. Next year, expect to see some Magic.