The first two weeks were basically spent identifying themes and discussing specific stories.
I was basically in charge of the script and I came up with four different ideas about the theme, the first one being a science fiction story where a person completely disappears in the universe, and there were different interpretations of that.
The second one was a visual one, with the idea of a cause-and-effect relationship through two unreal people in the same space but not intersecting lines of action, and I chose to refer to lpo barreta’s photography for the art style.
The third is a man’s different efforts to find his wife in a time loop, he wants to recreate the scene of their first meeting but no matter how hard he tries the world seems to be stopping him because when he goes back in time he has already destroyed the original cause and effect.
The fourth story has a number of small figures with a number of red threads representing karma intertwined with each other (from a Japanese legend). One of the figurines discovers these threads and tries to break free of them, as he realises that they are controlling him to some extent. But when he does break free he finds that no matter what he does he cannot influence anything in the world.
But none of these stories were very satisfying to me. They were either too difficult to show or difficult to craft.
So after a week I came up with a simpler story, because this collaboration wasn’t very long, so I wanted to keep everything simple. The story was a simple story of no reward without effort, where a little boy plants a star and with his hard work the star grows into a huge tree. I use it as a metaphor for people who work hard for their ideals and are eventually rewarded. I think it could have been done very beautifully, so in the end we chose this story
