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Paper Offerings (2022)

Paper Offerings was a short film I did with 2 friends, Tan Ning Xuan and Winona Mazo, and was a tribute to our own grandmothers and their tech savviness.

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It's about an old Taoist ghost who is left confused and afraid after being burnt strange paper offerings by her descendants.

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I was a director, the storyboard artist, and sound designer for the film.

It was made and shown at the Annecy Film Festival under the Paris-Lyon-Singapour program, and was later featured at multiple international film festivals and won 5 awards. Some notable ones include the 100-Second International Film Festival, the Shibuya TANPEN Film Festival CLIMAX at Sasebo, and The 5th Meihodo International Youth Visual Media Festival.

You can see more details of Paper Offerings here.

Behind the Scenes

Paper Offerings was shown to a French audience in Annecy. The goal of the Paris-Lyon-Singapour program was to not only connect French and Singaporean animation students, but to share our cultures as well. 

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We were encouraged to embed Singaporean life into our film, and Paper Offerings explored the Chinese tradition of burning paper offerings (such as hell bank notes) to our ancestors.

An earlier storyboard draft for the film.

In Singapore, it's common knowledge that some burn these offerings to help ease the suffering of our deceased relatives in the afterlife. In Taoism, all who die, regardless of their virtue, must go through the underworld in order to be judged and then rebirthed.

 

 

So, instead of rising up in this shot, which follows the "spiritualised" burnt hell note, we flipped the screen 180 and plunge down into the Taoist underworld. We wanted to subvert that western/Christian view of Heaven and Hell. 

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However, it was still hard to properly explain this concept without the French audience thinking Grandma had committed an irredeemable sin within 1min30s. We then decided to prioritise the board's goal of showing clearly the connection of burning offerings in the human world and them appearing in the afterlife instead.

 

And so, in this shot, the hell bank note goes all the way up the "Heaven" with Grandma's house in the sky so that a foreign audience will be able to understand the film as a whole quickly. 

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