“As a cartoonist, I have attended Berlin Film
Festival in Germany and Angouleme Animation Festival in France before. I’m
always very impressed by the short film festival and the animation festival in
France, because the French Film Festival has a very warm and interactive
atmosphere. Thanks to the funding of Create Hong Kong (CreateHK), I have this
chance to attend this high-profile film festival : Clermont-Ferrand
international short film festival with NAE group. During the festival, I
participated some forums. One of the topics was “ from short film to feature
films”, I’m particularly interested in the film production and I’ve learnt a
lot from different events.


As far as the global animation market is
concerned, the animation in both Europe and Asia can not be compared with
Hollywood's big production, both in terms of budget and creation time. However,
the style of the artwork in Europe and in Asia (such as Japan) is very vivid
and there are many varieties. Many high level short films come from Europe. At
the same time, the Asian art market is booming. Nowadays, the audience is
getting more and more educated. They are eager to see short films with a unique
style and a unique attitude. The style is never outdated. The power of style is
sustainable. This point needs to be kept in mind when we make creations.
This short film was accomplished in collaboration with two other artists. We
discussed the story line together. I set out characters, the other two artists
were responsible for animation and post-production. Our cooperation was very
happy. It’s a science fiction animation telling the story of Qu Yuan. We would
like to explore the relationship between free will and soul. The screen uses a
 neon and fluorescent color. The color are quite rich. Qu Yuan wrote the
famous poems such as "Li Sao" and "Heaven", they are very
beautiful. I would like to use modern imagery to express the beauty of illusion
in Qu Yuan's artwork.
The short film doesn’t have a clear story line, it’s more like fragments. After
the special screenings in Hong Kong, some foreign audiences said that due to
the cultural differences, they couldn’t understand Qu Yuan's story but they did
like the color and the artistic way of fragments . This is also the message which
we would like to send to the audience.
Now, our team is working on the sequel to this short film, and I hope to bring
our work again to France in the near future.
This year I’ve also applied for Annecy Animation Festival in France, I cross my
fingers for my work to be selected. ”





— Shared by Kong Khong-chang (Kongkee),
director of Departure after attending Clermont-Ferrand
International Short Film Festival & Market 2018 in France, under the
sponsorship of NAE.








*picture is extracted from https://www.instagram.com/clermontfilmfest/