password:babybird
EGG is 6 minutes animated short combining cel animation and digital collage. The main story focus on a lonely man, who lived on a plastic-formed island in the Great Pacific. One day, surprisingly, he found and hatched a supermarket egg. Since then, his life had changed dramatically.
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Director/Animator: Li-Wei Hsu
Sound Designer: Yin Lee
Composer: Natalia Tsupryk
Voice Actor: Jenru Wang
Animation Supervisor: Lisa LaBracio/Sofia Pashaei
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Festival Selections:
Biophilia International Film Festival
Uninhabited - International Film Festival
FICMARC - Caribbean Sea International Film Festival
Climate Change Streaming Service
FECEA - Festival Internacional de Cinema Escolar de Alvorada
Hellbender Student Film Festival
Changing Climate, Changing Lives (CCCL)
Film FestivalOcean City Film Festival
Crazy Talented Asians and Friends Film Festival
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Awards:
- Sustainable-Stories.org Film Fest - Honorable Mention
- Changing Climate Changing Life (CCCL) Film Festival - Youth Jury Award
- Changing Climate Changing Life (CCCL) Film Festival - Youth Jury Award
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GIFS:
POSTER:
CHARACTERS DESIGNS:
COLOR SCRIPT:
CHALLENGES:
Climate change has always been an important topic for me. I experienced some frustration in my third year in school while practicing zero waste and a vegetarian lifestyle, and the decision of the White House to pull out of the Paris agreement that year angered me. These events made me think that human was reaching the point of no return due to our own unaware selfishness, and here started the journey of EGG.
This wasn't an easy subject to tell, I didn't want the story to become preachy or cliche, or too artistic to understand.
For the first three months, I kept rewriting the script, then redrawing the characters. (at least 20 times I believe) Here are the sketches I did during that time.
After the design became a bit clearer, I moved the sketches to the computer.
After a few months of researching and suffering, I finally came to a very brief idea about a man living on a plastic island alone with his skeleton friend. (No plot yet)
Here I faced another challenge: how to present a plastic island?
My first solution was building backgrounds on paper, mixing traditional media with plastic waste in daily life.
However, the result wasn't perfect, they seemed too abstract and artsy. I was quite happy with those colleges, but when I showed them to other people, they hardly recognize them as an island.
Due to the limited time for the thesis, I decided to drop the hesitation and move forward to experiment with backgrounds in photoshop. It saved way more time than traditional collages, the style wasn't as pretty as I expected, but at least the concept become much clearer.
After building the style frames, most of the fragments started to come together. I rewrote the last version of the script and shared it with the thesis class and some friends. Surprisingly they loved it!
The only debate we got was should the bird stays alive or gets drown in the end. Well, even though I had no idea during that time, I slowly found the answer while spending time with these characters.
The fundamental concept of the short is selfishness leads to destruction, and I didn't want a Hollywood type of happy ending. For me, tragedy always startled people more. Even if it sounds a bit cruel, I still hope that the death of a baby bird can meant something in this film.