Recycled

The following images were sourced over the years from a recycling zone in the outskirts of Beijing. We scanned more than half a million 35mm color film negatives. Those negatives build up a portrait of the capital city and the life of her inhabitants over the last thirty years. Here, we selected 3000 photos to create the animation you are about to see. On Animation Language: My previous animation works were full of cute characters, with romantic and rich background colors, and feel good music (as in This Is Love and Magic Cube And Ping Pong), too. But I don't think they can fully represent my animation output. I feel there are still a lot of possibilities, and I would like to experiment more with different expressions in animation. That is also the reason why I choose not to use drawing in Recycle, and instead use photo processing and image sequencing, methods that I am not familiar with. They are drastically different from the 2D hand-drawn animation. So I felt at once confused and refreshed. When I first started the project, I set myself a few rules: to use the same number of photos per second, to only use photos from Sauvin's "Silvermine" project, to only select the photos and not make any adjustments to the colors and image size, nor would I do any cropping, and lastly, to use simple and low-tech method to complete this animation. It is a practice in self-restraint, to work within a set frame of rules. In addition, when making the selection, I purposefully chose the ones that have some wear and tear or damped. When put together as an animation, they would generate a certain unique beauty. (Pori Film Festival)