The short film debuted at the annual SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim on July 10, 1987, and received general enthusiasm from its attendants.

After cycling onstage to little fanfare, Lumpy begins a juggling act with three colored balls, which he continually drops by accident, prompting the unicycle to roll out from underneath him and catch them.

[3] Lasseter, Reeves and Ostby wanted to try and give the film a distinctly "dark and moody" look by having it take place in a rainy city setting.

[2][5] The film project came with two technical rationales; the bike shop scenes at the beginning and end were intended to demonstrate the rendering of highly complex imagery.

Due to the geographical complexity the spoked bikes and the shop fixtures, a typical frame of animation from the scenes contained more than ten thousand geometric primitives, which in turn were made up of more than thirty million polygons.

Due to the PIC's incapability of performing any motion blur, Lasseter instead used squash and stretch, which was also calculated by the QP, to convincingly animate the bouncing balls.

[2] As Red's Dream was being developed, space at Pixar was growing tight in its Marin County bungalow; during production, the animation group, consisting of Lasseter alongside several "technical directors" who created models and shaders and such, worked out of a hallway.

[3] One night, about two weeks before the deadline for SIGGRAPH, an engineer named Jeff Mock brought his camcorder around and shot an ersatz interview with Lasseter, who joked about the conditions.