EGG is an 6 minutes animated short combining cel animation and digital collage. The main story focus on a lonely man, who lived on a plastic formed island in the Great Pacific. One day,  surprisingly, he found and hatched a supermarket egg. Since then, his life had changed dramatically.

(The film is password protected due to festivals submission. Please contact me if you are interested in watching the whole animation.)

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Director/Animator: Li-Wei Hsu

Sound Designer: Yin Lee

Composer: Natalia Tsupryk

Voice Actor: Jenru Wang

Animation Supervisor: Lisa LaBracio/Sofia Pashaei

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Climate change has always been an important topic for me. I experienced some frustration in my third year in school while practicing zero waste and vegetarian life style, and the decision of White House pulling out Paris agreement that year angered me. These events made me think that human was reaching the point of no return due to our own unaware selfishness, and here it started the journey of EGG. 

This wasn't an easy subject to tell, I didn't want the story become preachy or cliche, nor too artistic to understand. 

At the first three months I kept rewriting the script, then was redrawing the characters. (at least 20 times I believe) Here are the sketches I did during that time.

After the design became a bit clearer, I moved the sketches into computer.

After few months of researching and suffering, I finally came to a very brief idea about a man living on a plastic island alone with his skeleton friend. (No plot yet)

Here I faced another challenge: how to present a plastic island? 

My first solution was building background on paper, mixing traditional media with plastic waste in daily life.

However, the result wasn't perfect, they seemed too abstract and artsy. I was quite happy with those collages, but when I showed them to other people, they hardly recognize them as an island. 

Due to the limited time for thesis, I decided to drop the hesitation and move forward to experiment background in photoshop. It saved way more time than traditional collages, the style wasn't as pretty as I expected, but at least the concept become much clearer.

After building the style frames, most of the fragments started to come together. I rewrote the last version of script and shared it with the thesis class and some friends. Surprisingly they loved it! 

The only debate we got was should the bird stays alive or gets drown in the end. Well, even myself had no idea during that time, but I slowly found the answer while spending time with these characters.

The fundamental concept of the short is selfishness leads to destruction, and I didn't want a Hollywood type of happy ending. For me, tragic always startled people more. Even it sounds a bit cruel, I still hope that the death of a baby bird can meant something in this film.