APPLICATION BRIEF THE WINDOWS REMIND ME
AUGEST 2025
Memory as material, self as dialogue, time as change.
STORYBOARD BRIEF IDEA
Using photo collage, drawing and animation to tell a story.
THE WORK AND ITS INNER THOUGHT
Scene Design — Photo Collage
1.A
Memory: Reconstruction Over Restoration
This work does not aim to restore any streetscape, but engages in reconstructive memory. Elizabeth Loftus shows memory is unreliable. It reshaped at each recall by emotion, cognition, and selfhood. This inspires me to embrace uncertainty and exploration.
Through photo collage, I use Winnicott’s idea of Transitional Space as a framework to reassemble imprecise, affective fragments of memory, creating the setting for my animation. My sources are recent photographs, while the recollections belong to the past. To reconstruct a streetscape from ten years ago with present material is impossible, yet I welcome this dislocation. Each piece holds multiple temporal states of the same place, reflecting the shifting, interwoven nature of my memory.
When creating, to preserve immediacy, I avoid archival documents from my youth. Instead I treat live recollections and conjectures as raw material, improvisationally constructing an imagined “adolescent streetscape” within this transitional zone. It is not reportage, but a subjective re-vision shaped by memory, speculation, and imagination.
Hopefully, the result is trance-like—a musing, sincere but not precise, rooted in reality yet drifting beyond it.
Character Design — Hand-drawn
1. Me: 26-year-old 2. Little me：15-year-old
Dialogue of Selves in the Mirror
I explore my changes in the project. The past self is not surpassed—it coexists. Its “naivety” mirrors present “maturity”; its courage reveals what the present may lack. I introspectively travel though the journey of self-becoming throuth my working process, and avoide to judge past against present. Inspired by existentialism—as Beauvoir argues, existence unfolds as a process rather than a fixed goal. Lacan’s notion of the imago, where selfhood forms through internalizing the other, further aligns with this vision.
Intheactofdrawingdifferentstatesof“me”,Ineedtoinhabitandinterpreteachinturn.Beforethescreen,thisprocessbringmearareformofself-integration.
Idea Summary
An observation of the street views outside my old apartment windows leads me to recall my teenage years and reflect on personal growth. This exploration is documented via a nostalgic, handcrafted, frame-by-frame animation, shared narratively to engage the audience.
Change and Coexistence, Not Growth
I explore my changes in the project. The past self is not surpassed—it coexists. Its “naivety” mirrors present “maturity”; its courage reveals what the present may lack. I introspectively travel though the journey of self-becoming throuth my working process, and avoide to judge past against present. Inspired by existentialism (Beauvoir, Camus), human existence is a process of “becoming”—not growth toward a fixed end. Whilist Lacan’s concept of imago, where selfhood forms through internalizing the other, further aligns with this vision.
In the act of drawing different states of “me”, I need to inhabit and interpret each in turn. This process bring a rare form of self-integration.
MAKING PROCESS
Observating current streetscapes, and then reconstructing new scenes from old-day memory.
WINDOW 1
WINDOW 2
3.Scene completion: Add figures and background details to enrich the reconstructed scenery.
1.Street photography: Observe and document the present-day streetscape in its original form.
2.Reconstruct from memory: Use existing street elements
MAKING PROCESS
Hand-drawn reimaginings of story fragments that flash through my mind
MAKING PROCESS
Voice-over: a writting of my inner monologue
