EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Aram and Kelly talk with animator extraordinaire Howie Shia and master puppeteer Anne Koizuimi in an attempt to answer the question: “what is an animation?” This episode includes Howie Shia’s live commentary of MARCO’S ORIENTAL NOODLES (https://youtu.be/IobYgrLpCX8). The second part of this conversation, which includes Anne Koizumi’s live commentary of IN THE SHADOW OF THE PINES (https://youtu.be/nI85ahkSmSA), will be available next week. Both of their works can be found on YouTube and on CBC Gem.
This episode uses the following multimedia samples and sources:
- AGO Creative Minds: Art and Social Justice (https://youtu.be/CUXtH1Zi6-g)
- “Say Good Night”, Joakim Karud
- “Jar Hut”, Morusque
- “Slowly”, Smith the Mister
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note below transcription was made using speech recognition software, and as such may contain inaccuracies, misspellings, or errors.
Matt Galloway [from audio clip] 0:00
Buffy Sainte Marie, if you think about the the celebrations of next year and the 150 How do you come into this? And what are you thinking that we should be celebrating?
Buffy Sainte-Marie [from audio clip]] 0:09
Stay calm and decolonized.
Aram Collier 0:28
Kelly, do you feel like you know more about animation after this conversation than before?
Kelly Lui 0:35
I can throw that question back to you know, I think if anything, this this conversation that we had with both Halloween and extended more questions, animation and what it can be and encompass
Aram Collier 0:51
definitely changed the way I thought they were going to answer our questions about animation and the process of it. And then also So learning what is a puppet and what isn’t a puppet, and how that’s animation, but also, a 2d animation is also animation, and so on.
Kelly Lui 1:10
Yeah, it’s interesting to think that we had this 10 minute I think pre recorded intro conversation about just clarifying how they want their work to be classified within animation. I think that just speaks to the wide range of what animation can be just thinking about Ann’s work combining like multiple kind of, what was it? I think we discussed like collage, but then could be also chord animation, and then also puppet animation, or is it Clay animation?
Aram Collier 1:42
I but it’s not but it’s not claymation it’s not the California reasons which apparently might be might be trademarked and then and then we learned what a armature was, which is, well, you have to listen to the episode to find out what that is.
Kelly Lui 1:58
But clearly, clearly We are such novices when it came to animation. But that’s why we wanted to talk to these folks. Right? Mm hmm. I think what’s also really neat about this conversation is that both Howie and Anne aren’t from Ontario. They’re from the prairies. And you had some great, great questions for them both Arab that I I’m really excited for everyone to hear.
Aram Collier 2:24
Yeah, it was really great conversation. It was really expansive, like the prairies themselves. You know, it took it in so many different directions. We talked about typography, we talked about trees, we talked about your conservative neighbors. We talked about diehard and jamesy data. So there’s all kinds of stuff that we talked about and so you know, it it did go a little bit longer than I think we thought but they were super generous with their time and, and i think i think i hope a lot of people will enjoy their conversation.
Kelly Lui 3:01
Yeah, the conversation was so extensive we had to split it into two parts. This episode you’ll hear a lot of commentary and discussion with Howie on his phone. Marco’s oriental noodles. And next week, you’ll get to listen to part two, where and shares her live commentary on in the shadow of the pines and you’ll also get to hear the rest of our conversation about her phone then. And on
Aram Collier 3:23
that note, welcome to Backstory podcast. I’m Aram Collier.
Kelly Lui 3:27
And I’m Kelly Lui.
We had a question, do an office first off on about how he should categorize what kind of Yes, yes. So we’re like properly using? We’re using the right
Aram Collier 3:48
so don’t call them cartoons.
Howie Shia 3:51
I got in trouble at the end of vivre calling my stuffed cartoons. I’m still mad about it. Really. You get you got dirty
Aram Collier 3:57
looks?
Howie Shia 3:58
Yeah, no, no Look, they were told me flat out don’t call you call this stuff cartoons. I was like Why?
Aram Collier 4:06
And and you, you would you would verify this attitude.
Anne Koizumi 4:10
I I don’t know who said that?
Well, no, it’s true. We don’t usually say cartoons But yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know what the reasoning is behind that. Just the word animation is constantly floating around at the NFB, but
I don’t think the general public would mind if he called cartoon.
Howie Shia 4:34
Yeah, it’s, I think, yeah, I don’t know. I I also don’t like the term graphic novels. So I’m like,
Aram Collier 4:40
so what do you call those?
Howie Shia 4:46
Anyways,
Aram Collier 4:47
okay. Okay. So, we’re down a rabbit hole already. So, no, I mean, I think one of the things was to just to clarify, so how we not only what you call it, but all So what is the technique that you use for your piece?
Howie Shia 5:04
Sure.
Aram Collier 5:06
Oh, can you tell us?
Howie Shia 5:11
Oh, okay, I guess.
And you probably know better than I do. It’s just an image and digital. It’s hand drawn. 2d animation dry. Yeah. To
Aram Collier 5:26
2d giant. Okay, animation. Okay. Okay.
Howie Shia 5:29
drawn animated. There’s a lot of different 2d animations.
Aram Collier 5:33
Oh, okay. drawn 2d animation.
Kelly Lui 5:36
Okay, I’m gonna write this in this
Aram Collier 5:38
general chat. Okay. Yeah, put that down.
Howie Shia 5:41
What are what are you? What are what are you calling your work? And
Anne Koizumi 5:47
I would say stop motion puppet anime.
Aram Collier 5:50
Okay. Okay, so it’s not claymation
Anne Koizumi 5:55
right? Yeah.
No, I don’t I don’t call it cleaning. But you can call it claymation if you want.
Aram Collier 6:02
It is clay right? There’s clearly
Anne Koizumi 6:06
You’re right. It might be
copyrighted by the guys who made
the California raisins.
Aram Collier 6:16
And it’s a puppet. Because why?
Kelly Lui 6:22
To puppet because? Well, it’s it’s made with us to see because I use puppets as my characters. I don’t know.
Aram Collier 6:33
Okay, sure.
Howie Shia 6:36
I think it’s because it’s an armature right you have an armature?
Anne Koizumi 6:39
Yeah, I have an armature,
Aram Collier 6:43
what’s an armature? basically like a skeleton underneath the the clay. Oh, okay. So if it didn’t have that then it would not be a puppet. It would be a model
Anne Koizumi 6:57
well because there’s different types of stop motion animation But you know, we think of Puppets just imagine like, like using dolls you know as the characters, but there is sand animation, there’s paper cutout stop motion animation. There’s clay on glass animation.
There’s just so many different forms but as soon as you say puppet animation, you understand that there’s little figures that are that are used as the main characters.
Aram Collier 7:25
Okay, I’m gonna throw out a reference and like it’s like Shaun the Sheep, or
Anne Koizumi 7:30
exactly like Wallace and Gromit. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is an example of a puppet stop motion.
Aram Collier 7:38
Okay, cuz I feel like they don’t ever call those puppets or dude or I don’t know, maybe they do.
Anne Koizumi 7:45
I think they call them okay, I’m
Aram Collier 7:47
not paying.
Anne Koizumi 7:50
What do you what do you hear them?
Aram Collier 7:52
What do they call them? Yeah, maybe that was just in terms of like when that came out because that was like what late 90s Yeah maybe like the memory of like the trademarked claymation was still in people’s minds.
Howie Shia 8:07
aromatically hasn’t seen any movie since 1999.
Anne Koizumi 8:11
also call it Clay animation.
Aram Collier 8:13
Okay, Clay animation. Okay. Okay. Well, that that that that clears that clears things up, I guess. Cool. Oh, okay. Question number two and because you have so but so you have like photo collages but that is not animation.
Anne Koizumi 8:32
No, no, it’s it’s really just photo collage. Okay. And there’s also archived footage in my phone. Mm hmm.
Aram Collier 8:40
Okay. So I don’t call that
collage.
collage it
Kelly Lui 8:48
could it could be a new, a new term could breaking new ground.
Howie Shia 8:54
Okay, there are people that do collages.
Aram Collier 8:56
Yeah, it’s really beautiful. Yes. There’s so many different types of animation to that, like, yeah, it just feels so, so, so deep. I mean, it’s just like, so much more craft involved, like and planning,
Howie Shia 9:13
maybe the way other people do it not the way I do.
Aram Collier 9:16
Well, you know, I actually want to ask you about that because it’s interesting, but I’m kicking that down the road. So
Kelly Lui 9:29
from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Howie Shaw is a Toronto based illustrator, animator, writer and director. A longtime friend of the festival, Howie’s award winning works have been featured at Reel Asian Film Festival, among other places, and he’s joined us multiple times on a panel and also as a moderator, a Chalmers Award nominee. His short films have won several awards around the world, including the 2007 Grand Prix at the Tokyo Atomy fair for his work flutter He is also a founding partner of the Toronto based music design film studio PPF house. Today he joins us with Marcos oriental noodles, which was a part of Jesse Wednesday’s Keep Calm and decolonize series for CBC
Aram Collier 10:16
from Calgary, Alberta. Anne Koizumi is a Montreal based animator, writer, director and educator. In 2006, she completed her first professional film a prairie story with the National Film Board of Canada’s hothouse three, an animation intensive for emerging animators. In 2011, she completed her master’s in film production at York University. Her films have screened nationally and internationally at NSC international animation film festival, slam dance animation nation in Singapore, w n dx, and the Calgary International Film Festival, and has extensively taught stop motion animation workshops and is currently working as the media arts educator at the National Film Board of Canada. Today she joins us with in the shadow of the pines, a CBC short Which was also featured in this year’s hot dogs festival and given an honorable mention by the jury for best Canadian short category. Hello, Howie and Anne, welcome to Backstory podcast.
Anne Koizumi 11:11
Hi, Erin Kelly.
Aram Collier 11:15
So we are going to talk a little bit about what how this episode is gonna work. It’s a little bit different than what we’ve done in the first couple of episodes. So so let’s let’s cover that a little bit first.
Kelly Lui 11:31
Today, we’re gonna ask both of our guys Howie and and to do a live commentary on their films. So as Aaron mentioned, this is totally different and new and we’re experimenting and it’s cool that we can experiment together and our producer Seung Woo the almighty Seung Woo is going to share his screen and we’ll be sure or we’ll be streaming both of your works.
Aram Collier 11:55
Yeah, and and how he will will provide some commentary. So if you’re listening to the podcast, At home on your device whatever stop right now and go watch the videos we’ll put the links in the show notes so watch those first we’ll wait posit watch the movies and then we’ll hear the commentary and of course let us know if you like or dislike this format. Give us some give us some feedback and tell us what you think if you’d like to hear more of these
Howie Shia 12:25
you like or dislike these films?
Aram Collier 12:29
No, come on. It’s about the podcast the obvious. Anyway, so So we’re gonna start with Howie and then move on to ads work. No, are you guys ready? Yeah, some will count us down to start
Howie Shia 12:45
321
Okay, so this is film was a part of Jessie went series keep coming. decolonize which was a quote from the from speech. The book Sainte Marie made a few years ago. And the the idea was to imagine a Canada
a decolonized. Canada what that would be.
It was not entirely clear to me I was quite reticent to actually take on the project because I wasn’t sure that I had anything to say or I had a right to say anything about the subject. But I eventually came around to it, because I kept for some reason thinking about food, and then specifically noodles and food culture and I and I thought there was something that I could talk about from that front because I feel like food culture for whatever reason, in all of our sort of political correct political groups, So, right now gets a pass in terms of sort of the colonization discussion. every university kid thinks they are, oh, authentic ramen or tacos or whatever there’s there’s this very predatory or psychedelic poly dimensions search for
authenticity in ethnic foods
and,
and then sort of a gentrification of it as a result, and that seemed like something that I, for whatever reason could talk about and that I could kind of relate to my upbringing growing up in Saskatchewan.
And
yeah, and so somehow this film kind of spilled out I was also interested in thinking about specifically thinking about the prairies, as The future of the prairies is science fiction. I’ve never really done I like science fiction. I’m kind of I’m not a hardcore sci fi guy, but I’d never done anything that was really sci fi. And it seemed like that there was kind of this hole in in, again, in science fiction as a genre of what small cities are, or large towns are sort of the entities. Not quite urban, like Metropolitan and not quite rural sort of cities that make up most of you know, the world
where, what those places would look like in the future, what those cultures would look like.
And so I wanted to sort of look at specifically what what I knew of a Saskatchewan
and push it into the future and exaggerate it. Expand
the cultural
and fashion sort of politics.
I run out of time.
Aram Collier 16:14
Great. That was great.
Maybe Can you just go to the beginning like the beginning of the of the film, pass this first card? Yeah. Okay. Right off, how we what went into deciding this color for this film?
Howie Shia 16:35
Ah, yeah, that’s a good question, I think,
to sketch one, the architecture, the structure of the city is is very sort of brown and sort of manly and in the kind of smaller cities that bond brokers is meant to represent logbooks, not a real town. It’s an imaginary it’s roughly based on like Kindersley, and stuff current and places like that, where the large part of the city is just like, the downtown is a single strip and then you kind of, then you pass the city essentially. So there’s that part of it, but then the thing that sort of makes the sketch one I think special is that the sky inevitably kind of undermines all of that masculinity every day. Yeah. Because it’s, it’s the skies really beautiful and you know, in the dawn and, and at dusk, it’s it’s all sorts of beautiful colors and very soft and rosy colors. So that that was part of it. And the other part of it was just there was a very short production time and small budget and I needed to keep things simple.
Anne Koizumi 17:54
How we you grew up in Saskatoon.
That’s right.
Kelly Lui 17:58
I’m just thinking about like, How different Saskatoon looks from small town. Saskatchewan because this this to me like could be Saskatoon, but am I totally wrong?
Howie Shia 18:09
It could be Yeah, I mean there’s parts of it that are
parts of Saskatoon that definitely look like this and and you know going back nowadays I there several times a year so it’s it’s it’s quite Saskatoon specifically is a quite an interesting place because of the architecture and the space that it has is all the same but the storefronts specifically are changing quite a lot and look much more contemporary and sort of deconstructed for better and worse as as an all cities but so this, yeah, this is kind of my perception of what it is. Trying to hang on to the old sort of low built where architecture but playing around with more contemporary design and storefronts
Aram Collier 19:11
and such I like what you said about the sky in the West because I also grew up in the West in the western United States a little bit too and maybe and if you feel this way as well it’s just different than Ontario, Montreal like you You can actually see the sky and and what you say about colors is just so true.
Anne Koizumi 19:36
For sure, I definitely associate the prairies with open sky and that’s that’s very well visually represented here. Like I don’t even think you would have to have written long Brooks’s sketch but I, just by looking at that image, I would have thought it was somewhere in the prairies.
Aram Collier 19:51
But can I can I ask though, because I think about that a lot. Right about why does the sky seem so different in the West? And is it because like, there’s Just fewer trees.
Howie Shia 20:01
I wonder about that a lot too. I always thought it was just because there might the the architecture was lower, though. Yeah. Hey, like I was talking to an architect last summer there and he was saying that he was really, things were really changing in Saskatoon. They were like, very seriously, they had been a lot of like four storey buildings they’ve been working on. And like, that was a real, like, achievement for him. And I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s, that’s, you know, I I grew up there, I’d never thought about it. And I, you know, I go back there a lot, but it never sort of occurred to me until sort of that moment that Oh, everything is you get so much more sky just because there’s nothing blocking it.
Aram Collier 20:48
I mean, that’s also a typography thing to write and like, it’s easier to build. Like if you have wide, flat space, why build build horizontally, not vertically. Right, right. Exactly. Yeah, but I don’t know. I mean, just like, you know, moving to Ontario, there’s a lot of trees here. So that makes me think about the relationship to this guy to where I grew up in New Mexico. It’s like, there’s not a lot of trees. Like it’s a desert. So you just see the sky a lot more to I don’t know, I think about that a lot.
Anne Koizumi 21:19
The same in Montreal to like, there’s tons of trees in my neighborhood, and it’s an older neighborhood. So these trees are like, massive, you know, whereas in Calgary, where my mom lives, it’s just like, there’s there’s trees, but they’re not nearly as big as the ones here. And you can see and again, she lives in the suburbs, though, because so you can see obviously, a lot of the Open, open sky so yeah, I’m sure the trees do have a lot to do with it.
Aram Collier 21:45
Welcome to Backstory podcast about trees.
Like I’m just gonna be giggling in the background.
Howie Shia 21:59
You know, it’s funny sorry. About the typography though because I a few several years ago now I was doing as a pilot for Disney based in Saskatchewan and I had these incredible people working with me and this incredible layout artist who had done this beautiful like I’d given him some sort of direction about what what I wanted this you know location to look like and he did this beautiful sort of painting of like rolling hills and stuff and I was like, I love this but this looks nothing like the sketch when you get out your ruler. Just draw straight line
Anne Koizumi 22:41
so like the the pilot was like actually taking place in Saskatchewan, like the story was actually Yeah,
Howie Shia 22:47
yeah. Wow. superhero story in Saskatchewan.
I offered I said that they could change it if they wanted to, but the they were so tickled by the name They loved it. So
Aram Collier 23:04
I had a question at around one minute in some way maybe. So that so when we when we’re inside of the restaurant I think this is the the line where it’s like And who are these Yahoo’s eating this food? The way that you show faces you the way you chose to show faces? I’m kind of obscured. What was your thinking behind that?
Howie Shia 23:27
Oh, you know what, I never really thought too much about that. I guess you’re right. I’m part of that might just be a fear of drawing faces and having to invest a clear character and emotion to that person then if you draw a face, there has to be an emotion that comes with it. And I think I didn’t have the energy to possibly think that through entirely part of it was just I thought, maybe this is where the passion of the time It was heading. Like, there’s a thing with in Saskatchewan and on the, in the Midwest in general, I think and you probably have noticed this were like, still to this day, guys where the baseball caps are really low down with really, really thick bill.
Anne Koizumi 24:19
I feel like I kind of I understand that image.
Howie Shia 24:23
Right. And so they’re their faces are very obscured anyways. So I think maybe that was part of it certainly for the main character that was sort of part of the what I was going for. Part Two, exaggerate some of the cut and proportion to push it into the future a little. But yeah, part of it was, I think, a sense of where fashion might be going and
Aram Collier 24:54
where you want it to go.
Howie Shia 24:56
Yeah, well, I don’t know. But I know that I think Have it actually though the other thing is I think that
the main character does, it stole from his point of view, and he, he isn’t actually very interested in these, he doesn’t see them as people. So I don’t think he’s looking for their faces, if that makes any sense.
Aram Collier 25:18
Well, he’s certainly more well defined in his face. I mean, even though you don’t see his eyes, you see, you see the kind of like lines on his face. There’s much more definition there.
Howie Shia 25:26
Yeah, and I think it’s, it’s this thing where it’s very easy to treat people like
an other and an invading force, if you don’t sort of pay too much attention to them. You know, it’s a hipster. The cartoon of a hipster is you know, a beard and, and short jeans, or whatever you want to call it, right? If you can just sort of see that whole neighborhood as that instead of actually looking at their faces and their bodies, then it’s easier to sort of criminalize them. So I would I would say that that’s from a narrative point of view that that’s probably partly what I was thinking at the time.
Anne Koizumi 26:07
I imagined that, you know, making a sci fi film would be challenging, because you’re constantly thinking about, well, what does everything look like in the future? How did you kind of plan that out? Like from the we’re talking about just costumes, and everything from, like, the restaurant to the way that people eat?
Howie Shia 26:31
Uh, I
I actually really don’t like the design process. I so most of this stuff is first pass. I don’t like I went back and I just moved so I went back and sort of found all my old scrapbooks and stuff. I think there’s maybe four, four prep drawings I did before. Actually just starting the film. I tried to board kind of chronologically, so it just sort of happened in a fell one fell swoop it might be different if I had more time and more budget, but it was this was a real, very, very fast job and my wife was about to give birth. So
make sure things were succinct.
Kelly Lui 27:28
jumping off on that question, like I just was curious about the choices setting this like 20 years ahead, which is the future but also not too far away. Where I feel a lot of this film is familiar yet not and then the noodles that that launch you like four seconds into the future. So that’s really interesting, kind of play with with time.
Yeah, just wondering, like, the decision making behind that. Um, it was it was awesome. Very one thing led to another.
Howie Shia 28:06
The film started not in the future actually, it just started with this idea of food culture and sort of the self righteousness of food culture, which I’m planning guilty of. But I felt like I think one of the things about dealing with telling the story in the future is I felt like I could think judgments and and character choices and talk about sort of politics a little bit in a way that was not that wasn’t going to sort of offend anyone in the present, though it would there give me a bit of distance and a bit of slack and in terms of what I could say, and not saying without people saying, You’re talking about this and this guy. And so I think that’s partly Where the future stuff came in and it helped the psychedelic kind of pseudoscience is the underbelly of it was all partly that’s like my, my imagination likes, I like to think about silly things like that. And, and partly that it all becomes a tool for sort of not getting a point across because I’m not sure exactly that there’s a clear statement in the film, but it it helped to loosen the constraints I think of having to say, made it easier to ask a question than having to say something I think if if I if I could loosen it up from from the confines of the present tense.
Does that make any sense or did I just make noise? I
Aram Collier 29:49
don’t know. I I’m curious because it seems like you were we’re trying to be discreet or Or careful around that you were being that this was part of a commission about decolonization. Right and that, right. But, so, maybe you were being careful, but were you also skirting around it a little bit in a way
Howie Shia 30:15
possible. I mean, I, I’ve tended to not make very political work and
but I, I, I think I mean, this was a very, really interesting and freeing kind of a film, I think, our story for me to work on, partly because I think, and maybe you felt this way too. But like, once Trump was elected, this was shortly after Trump was elected. My my second reaction after, you know, the first one of like, what really was seen was something around the bulb. Part of, Oh, I have a I’m in a position that most people aren’t in so far as I actually know, the people that I’m friends with and care about some of the people that, that support whatever they thought Trump was representing. And it was, as such, I did feel a little bit like it was I had a responsibility to sort of soften the view of those people and like bring, present them as people and explore them and sort of soften the border between sort of whatever you want to call it left and right.
Aram Collier 31:43
And so your protagonists in this would be what what you would characterize as one of those people?
Howie Shia 31:48
Well, yeah, I mean, I think the protagonists is the idea I think, that I drew me to him was this and it’s partly of my own getting old, you know, to his Realizing that at some point, people that feel like that they’re at the cutting edge, inevitably sort of fall behind the cutting edge and fall behind it and are taken over and the film itself is actually based. There’s the opening shot. There’s this you one of the shop on the very left called Calvinists, and it’s the film is a riff on on his his book, Invisible Cities, but you guys probably know, it’s a conversation between Cooper Kahn and Marco Polo, where Marco Polo describes one imaginary city after another to prove and the idea sort of on first reading, you’re kind of dazzled by the imagination of these these cities, but sort of our own revisiting it. Later in in my life, I I became much more interested in The couple of cartoon character because his his whole sort of reason he’s asking for this. And the problem of this is he’s realizing that his empire has grown beyond his not not just his control, but his understanding. And I felt like that was kind of an inevitable thing that for any any of us asking for decolonization, any of us asking for a more open and whatever the consequences of that a will at some point, likely be quite foreign to what we anticipated and wanted. So, so I think that’s kind of where the main character for this film sort of comes in. As somebody who started as thinking he was he was the most cosmopolitan person in the city and now
this fed up with all these people that he doesn’t recognize
Thank you Good night.
Kelly Lui 34:11
But I guess on that like, creating the names for your ramen dishes, how did how did that come about? And do you have other like, ramen dishes that you’ve come up with? But then they didn’t make the cut into the film?
Howie Shia 34:26
I definitely do. I wish I could remember them. But yes, definitely there were, there was a list of I think about 20 that I was all very excited about but it came down to sort of how many I could fit in and how many I could kind of explain in a in a in a, in a reasonable way that didn’t require too much sort of exposition. Some of the ones a lot of them are they What it ended up having to be was names that you could basically get the idea of them from from just hearing the name. So, yeah, I just noticed there’s there’s a bottom sort of second and a half from the left. It’s a it’s a Tesseract.
I don’t remember drawing at all.
Aram Collier 35:29
Just the last question on it. So you know, it ends with this great line that says, Look how beautiful the future is. How did you feel like what were you trying? What kind of sentiment or closing feeling were you trying to kind of give the audience there? Ah,
Howie Shia 35:46
I can tell you how I kind of arrived at I don’t know exactly what, what my intention is but i i for a long time I I was trying to end it from the eliminate character’s point of view. And I couldn’t make it work, it felt too much of a judgment and feel too closed.
What what he was saying I couldn’t I couldn’t come up with anything that felt like it kind of hearing from him at the end, it felt like anything that he said would signify some kind of character arc.
Either great or small, and I wasn’t.
I wasn’t prepared to commit him to that, and I didn’t. And to some extent, I don’t believe in you know, that kind of that kind of an arc, especially in a three minute film. But so, there was a moment where I realized, oh, if I like step away from him and give the sort of the final moment to somebody else, that’s just Observing reality or her reality, something from from someone else’s point of view, it felt like that was a better that was a better sort of description of what where he was failing is that he was he maybe, but not but without sort of discounting anything he had gone through it was experiencing on any of his thoughts. I felt like shifting the point of view for a moment. And showing that there was just this whole other reality that from from somebody else’s point of view, that it was somehow that I felt like that was the right way to end the film. Yeah, because I guess Yeah, I know. I won’t say too much more. Okay, hang on, leave that punch un-thrown.
Kelly Lui 38:13
Backstory podcast is written and hosted by Aram Collier and Kelly Louie. It’s edited and produced by some loopback that is presented by Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. Check out our show notes for more information about how we analyze works. Let us know what you think of it this episode, email us@backstory.ra at gmail.com
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Backstory Podcast 