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Our Story
This short film began as a final project for my undergraduate political class. Driven by our own curiosity, my classmate Meiqi Lin and I decided to explore our interesting topic by producing a short film.
Through the perspective of Chinese college students, it delves into a discussion about “involution” in today’s society. Involution is a popular Chinese term in recent years. It describes a situation where people, due to intense social competition, start to compete in irrational ways, fight over resources, and waste energy. As a result, society’s overall output goes down instead of going up.
In the story, two very different roles meet by chance, and each ultimately discovers a personal path forward. Although involution may be unavoidable, having direction and passion can lift us up after we stumble—at times feeling lost, but never truly losing our way.
In this project, I was responsible for choosing the locations, doing the filming, and planning the event. We mainly shot on campus, which gave us limited choices for scenes. Because of this, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to use lighting to show the characters’ emotions and the flow of the story.
For the final screening, I used Python to create a WeChat mini program as a small interactive game after the film. Our theme is how young Chinese people find their direction and passion in a very competitive society. I thought it would be fun for the audience to scan a code and get a random message of blessing or encouragement. I put a lot of effort into this mini program, selecting about 80 different positive quotes and tweaking the background colors to match the film’s palette. In the end, more than 150 students came to watch our film and took part in the interactive session.
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Result Showcase
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Behide the scenes
