Cartoons Underground 2015

Cartoons Underground 2015 is the fourth instalment for Singapore’s first and largest animation festival. It’s co-founded by Vicky Chen whom I found to be extremely dedicated to promoting the local animation scene. You Ci Ke 有刺客 is part of the official selection curated by Tan Wei Keong. Thanks Wei Keong!

I was there on Saturday evening to share about the creation of You Ci Ke 有刺客 at the director’s Q&A session after the screening. More importantly, I was there to learn. It’s really a joy to watch people entertained by the work we do and to have put a smile on their faces. It was so heartwarming and encouraging to people coming up to us to tell us what they liked about our films and everybody had so many ideas on how there can be a collaboration, on how to take things further. It was a great evening.

By pure chance, I bumped into Enrique and Richard, the CG Supervisor and Creative Director of One Animation, and I was very encouraged to hear that my insistence and desire to work in the entertainment side of the industry is acknowledged. I am super thankful for Professor Hannes to drop by to give his support and also for his insightful advice that creative work and commercial doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. I very much agree and the tricky part is finding the balance and I think I’m getting closer.

There were some seriously engaging and entertaining films screened at this festival and I’m super happy for our films (Coldsteam directed by Nicholas Chia and The Octopus Lady by Amanda Wang)  to be amongst them. I wished You Ci Ke‘s Art Director, Han Qingping was there to share her insights too. She’s so good at what she does.

I think most films are still making theirs rounds of festivals so they won’t be available online but here’s the programme list on Cartoon Underground’s website in case you’ve missed the festival and/or wish to follow up on their work when it’s released. I loved all of Bendito Machine V by Jossie Malis,  the tension in April 21 by Jessica Poon and of course the pig-bat creature in Need a Hand?! by Kong Yee Rou.

I was never informed but was just told there we were featured on Culturepush! Thanks Culturepush!

So here’s a dark and blurry photograph of us at the event!

From left to right: Vicky Chen, Amanda Wang, Ronald Fong, Nicholas Chia and Rachel Kong