Artist Statement

A Person Sits Before A Tidal Wave is a single-channeled 2D animation about a person’s experience of encountering hardship and overcoming it. The plot focuses on a person being swept by a tidal wave and then getting out of the water eventually.

The main concept of this project is unstableness, which is embedded in the film both in the plot and in visual features. The protagonist is unstable and fatigued as she fails to do what she wants to do. Visually, it was achieved by adding a sense of instability with colour, lines and scattered photographs in the scene. The colour changes according to the protagonist’s emotional state and position. Animated lines wobble and flicker from time to time, while they are supposed to be on the screen to illustrate the character’s internal turmoil. The scattered photographs, which are meant to be parts of photo collages, might be merely making a mess throughout the film. However, this project is not only about displaying unstableness. It is also asking questions about what the person would do about it. After the wave, when she is back to where she used to be, what is left with her?

A Person Sits Before A Tidal Wave is inspired by my personal process when being lethargic and melancholy. I thought about those feelings regarding what I do when they get closer, and what I do when they arrive. This film is nuanced, gentle and reflective, to mirror the ways I get lost in my thoughts and the efforts I take to find my way back to a more stable reality. Through making this film, my hope is to connect with others who may struggle with their own questions of instability.

In the personal experiences I used as the reference, memory took an important role. To represent memory, photo collage has been a crucial medium for this project. Photo collage, visually and technically, has allowed me to easily introduce various textures into the scenes. But as in the conceptual part, photo-collage has a significant role in bringing in ‘photo’ and ‘collage’. Photographs are a means of visual documentation, and they show a moment in the past. A collage is used when a person collects things to create another piece from them. The concept of collecting the document of the past and seeing and creating meaning from it was what I wanted to embed in this project.

Photo collage also takes part in building up the surrealistic mood. Surrealism in this film provides a dream-like atmosphere. 'Dream', a vulnerable subconscious space, is where a person can face fear and cure it. This is depicted in the latter part of the film when the person submerges in the water. The strong orange and red colours suddenly disappear in the next scene, which is inspired by sunsets followed by dark nights. At nighttime, the person would fall asleep and recharge herself. And when the alarm clock rings, she would be dragged out of sleep, back to life again.

Still Life (2023)