My BAFTA nominated, multi-award winning and international festival hopping short film. Premiering at Encounters SFF in 2016 and going on to screen at over 80 festivals including Sundance, SXSW, GLAS, Annecy, Animafest Zagreb, ITFS, Sheffield doc fest, Telluride, EIFF and Pictoplasma.
Awards
BAFTA Nominated Animated Short Film 2017
Best Animated Documentary at KLIK Amsterdam 2016
Audience choice for Best Animated Documentary at LIAF 2016
Jury Award for Best Short Film at 10th British Shorts Film Festival, Berlin 2017
RTS London Student Awards, Best Undergraduate Animation 2017
RTS National Award for Best Undergraduate Animation 2017
FANtastische Award at ITFS 2017
Best Director in the Short Documentary category at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival 2017
Best animation at Vidlings and Tapeheads VTFF 2017
Jury’s Special award at SICAF 2017
Special mention, student competition, Anibar 2017
Nominee for the Hanburg Animation Award 2017
Underwire Best Animator Award 2017
Student Academy awards finalist 2017
ADAA finalist 2017
Debyutoria Prize at Insomniafest 2017
Vimeo Staff Pick 2017
Best Animation at This is England 2017
Final Jury Prize Akira Otera at Kyoto International Student Film Festival 2017
Nominee for Student Solo Project at The Motion Awards 2017
BAA British Animation Awards finalist for Best student film 2018
ANNY Best of Fest 2018
Best Animated Short film at WOFFF 2018
Best in Category – Student MAFF 2018
Credits
A Film By Jennifer Zheng
Original Score By K. Preston Merkley
Audio Mix By Fonic
Many Thanks To:
Martina Bramkamp
Stephen Brown
Goeff Grandfield
Phil Hollins
Derek Leung
Chris Shepherd
Marie- Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovitz
Katy Wang
Lynn Yun
Lili Li
Scott Schmitt
Jonathan Zheng
Xue-Heng Zheng
Illustration Animation BA Kingston University 2016
Tough
Short film
Some things can only be understood with maturity.
New light is shed on childhood cultural misunderstandings when a Chinese mother and her British born daughter speak as adults for the first time.
Growing up I had a lot of questions about my identity and the filmmaking process gave me permission to ask them. I started this film with an honest conversation with my mother…which I recorded and edited to make the voice over you hear in the film.
As I was researching cultural revolution China, I found beautiful propaganda posters. It made sense to take inspiration from them.
I experimented with saturated colours, print textures and graphite.
The pencil textures became increasingly important to what I wanted to communicate with the film: the feeling of intimacy. The graphite symbolised that to me, so I resolved to include it in my production process.
I animated and coloured digitally before printing out each frame, shading over top with pencil and finally scanning and compositing the images back together.
I feel this process gave the film a tangible warmth it wouldn’t otherwise have.
