From Aini To Europa | movie | 2024 | Official Featurette | dG1fWXV4aF91bUR3NWM
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Short filmTranscript
00:00My name is Sidney Chan, and I'm the director for From Aini to Europa.
00:06It's about two stepsisters, Yue and Aini,
00:09who share a bond over a mysterious radio
00:12that could contact an alien named Sam.
00:14Yue has to adjust to a new life,
00:17and Aini, who lives in her own world,
00:19learns to share it with Yue.
00:21It's all about childhood innocence, grief,
00:24and the power of imagination.
00:27I originally wrote this story in 2016
00:30for that year's BMW Shorties
00:32during a very difficult time in my life.
00:34It was never finished, and I had zero confidence in it,
00:37and I hadn't directed anything for a very long time.
00:40I can't go into detail, but a few things happened this year
00:43that reminded me that I needed to create again.
00:46With eight more years of experience,
00:48I rewrote the script from scratch.
00:50I showed it to my producer, Kyrie,
00:52and then he showed it to other people,
00:54and then more and more people came on board
00:56because they believed in the script.
00:58And that was very encouraging.
01:00It gave me a lot of confidence,
01:02and I'm very grateful for that.
01:04I wanted to make something
01:06that reminded me of films from childhood,
01:08stuff from Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Studio Ghibli.
01:13At the same time, I wanted to remind people
01:16that despite all the problems,
01:18all the fighting, all the drama in our life,
01:20there's a world much bigger than us.
01:22It's a very Carl Sagan theme.
01:24The Earth is just a pale blue dot in space.
01:27And I also wanted to use real footages
01:29and sound effects from NASA.
01:32One major challenge was budget and time.
01:35We mostly paid out of our own pocket,
01:37and also working around everyone's schedule,
01:40from workshopping the script to getting the location,
01:43planning the shoot, planning the art.
01:45It's a miracle we even found our actresses,
01:47Tania and Obeira,
01:48who were very, very easy to work with.
01:54It's not very easy to find such natural child talents
01:58in such a short time.
02:00Fun fact, I also recently found out that
02:02Kumaira was born around the same week
02:05I started working on the script.
02:13We actually considered shooting on a real roof,
02:16but that would have been so dangerous.
02:18So at the last minute, we switched to green screen,
02:21and we managed to get a hold of Tam Khaled
02:23to build the roof in his studio.
02:25Despite being heavy on art and setup,
02:28we managed to squeeze it all into two days of shoot.
02:31And it's also my first time ever
02:33sitting in front of a monitor
02:34and just focusing on directing.
02:36I needed to trust in my team to make it work,
02:39despite all the rush.
02:40And the same thing happened with post-production.
02:43There's a lot of pressure for music,
02:45sound design, VFX, and grading.
02:48Some of us even fell sick during the last stretch.
02:51The version that we sent to BMW,
02:53it's the best that we could manage
02:55for the short time given.
02:56And I'm proud of the team
02:58for being able to put all of this together.
03:01And after all of this is done,
03:03we do plan to work on it more.
03:05Even towards the end,
03:06this film continued to grow very differently
03:09from the original script.
03:11We had such an amazing team.
03:13Everyone understood the essence of the story
03:16and also brought in their own creative interpretations.
03:19There's a sense of collective ownership
03:21and I really like that feeling.
03:24Pulse represents the beating heart
03:25of every living thing in the universe.
03:28It also represents connection,
03:30a signal,
03:31be it an electromagnetic pulse wave in our neurons
03:35or radio waves that we send out to the universe
03:38in hopes that we could get a reply back.