When it shrinks, it expands. It floats and it sinks. It separates but connects. When I think I’m watching them, they're actually watching me.
A charming animation rhyme that weaves together the many days of observing, recording, and experimenting.

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Director Statement

In the fall of 2019, on the day I left for Viborg, Denmark, for an artist-in-residence program, I decided to start a picture diary to note the days ahead of me which were probably going to be filled with many new memories.

Arriving in Denmark, I suddenly lost my ability to express myself in words because I hadn’t studied up on my English. However, this way of life seemed to instead heighten my physical senses, and although I was there for only about two months, the sunsets seemed to penetrate my body, rain became less annoying, and I was surprised to find the morning dew on the
leaves so plump and shimmery. (I’ll turn a blind eye to the fact that describing the experience in words only dulls the sensation...)

The picture diary has become a part of my daily routine and I am in my fourth year of keeping record of events, dreams, and emotions. This film began by selecting a few entries from the diary and turning them into animation. I transcribed each of the pictures onto the first page of a small flipbook, making sure not to alter the wholeness of the feeling I received from that particular incident. Then, from the next page, I added motion to the lines of the previous page. As I went on, all the lines came alive and couldn’t keep still. They began to relate to each other, resonate with each other, repel against each other — all of them affecting the subsequent development. How the pictures progressed without me knowing where they were heading, and how new ideas emerged as I let the work take me wherever it wanted to go, I felt like this is how dreams must be generated. After I saw the resulting animation, I wrote rhymes for it without being confined to the texts I wrote in the original diary. And then, I drew more pictures. As I repeated this process, honninman jumped in and started creating the music. This film came to be by exchanging pictures, music, rhymes, voices — back and forth and back again. Come to think of it, the tiny container I stayed in Denmark was set up in a huge schoolyard in a small town. I hope you will come to play in the big yard inside the
teeny-weeny pocket.