A Sun

Title Sequence
Animation
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Collaborators
Cathy Xiao & Tiffany Shen

Roles
Concept Development, Storyboarding, Modeling, Texturing, Lighting

Special Thanks
Professor Miguel Lee

Synopsis
A Sun, a Taiwanese film by Chung Mong-hong, it is an authentic portrayal of a family bearing the hardship of unmet expectations, unspoken grief, and stubborn pride. Perseverance and healing overshadows the turmoil and conflict as the family tries to mend their broken relationship. The story is grand, yet intimate. It depicts the suffocating reality of a life that continues through the search for solution.
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Concept
Life is a complicated subject that can be represented by simple things, such as the weaving of threads. The sequence focuses on a single thread intersecting and intertwining, creating a pattern of lines that form the endless knot. In Chinese culture, endless knot represents the circulation of life and symbolizes hope for family unification. The growing and intertwining threads represent the family’s reformation after being split by tragedies. The journey of the thread is an abstract projection of life. The knot is revealed in an ordinary Taiwanese apartment, grounding the abstract in the mundane.

A Sun Animation

Styleframe

Storyboard Process

In the early stages of the storyboard process, we were trapped in trying to retell individual character stories from the film. We took a step back and looked at the film as a whole and after studying closely, realized that the film illustrates the family's journey. So we used weaving threads to capture that essence.

Reference

We studied real-life and 3d strings and threads references to create our own design. In order to build a convincing Taiwanese apartment, we asked friends and looked on Airbnb for references.