inspiration
I started with the idea of making an animated short film with a strong narrative story, but then I felt that with only four months to make FMP and the fact that it would be difficult for me to make a very high-quality narrative short film on my own, as I had to consider the story, the characters, the events and the music, more importantly, it would be difficult to tell a good story within a minute or two. Overall, I decided to make a surrealistic animated short film, not only with refined graphics but also with a strong philosophical concept. After a series of research, I decided to make a story about Zhuang Zhou, who was one of the greatest thinkers and philosophers of ancient China. One of his philosophical stories is about one day he dreamt that he had turned into a butterfly, and when he woke up, he wondered: did I dream of the butterfly or did the butterfly dream of me. He believes that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between dreams and reality and that dreams can sometimes give us a sense of reality, while reality can also give us a sense of being in a dream. This reminds me that our universe is made up of countless planets, with small planets revolving around big ones, a structure very similar to the molecules, so is it possible that we are just a tinny part of God? To put it another angle, are we the gods of others? In the follow-up study, I found that I could possibly combine Zhuang Zhou’s theory with Freud’s theory of personality, the id represents the most basic unit of our world – the molecule, the ego represents our original world, and the superego refers to the world of God which is composed by our world.
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