INTERVIEW: Ervin Han on Timescapes5 min read
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Timescapes is an anthology of animated short films set against the landscapes of Singapore produced by local animation studio Robot Playground Media. With a large focus on some of Singapore’s heritage sites, the Timescapes anthology is a nostalgic journey and a tribute to significant places.
Each story carries feelings of sentimentality and inspires us to appreciate our homeland more. Films like Playgrounds and Little Red Bricks remind us of the history we’ve shared with our country in a sweet and heartwarming manner. Through the montage-esque sequences, feeling lost in time becomes normal while immersed in these stories of home.
Norwegian distribution company Northern Film Group recently acquired the rights to promote Timescapes to an international audience, marking an exciting new chapter for this anthology. One of the animated films under the Timescapes anthology, The Violin, will also be adapted into a feature film.
The newest addition to the Timescapes anthology, Erhu, will be released online later in February. Dubbed as the spiritual prequel to The Violin, Erhu explores how mass Chinese emigration to Singapore helped create its own unique culture as Singapore became a free port in the 1800s.
Timescapes writer, director, and producer Ervin Han shares: “I believe our lives, memories and imagination are deeply intertwined with our living landscapes. For a small nation like Singapore with a relatively short history, balancing conservation of its heritage sites and urban development is often a difficult challenge. Heritage isn’t about tearing things down and building monuments for them — it’s a living thing passed on through stories. While these films are, at their heart, about innocent times and the bittersweet simplicity of life, they’re also a paean to the places in Singapore I remember while growing up.”
Intrigued, we decided to ask Han a few more questions about the making of the anthology as well as its new developments.
What nudged you to make this anthology and gave you inspiration for each of the stories?
Some years back I developed around 20-25 story ideas for an animated anthology set against backdrops of Singapore in the past, present and future.
In 2015 we had the opportunity to make one of those stories, The Violin, into a short film with the support of the Singapore Memory Project. The public responded quite positively to that film which led to StarHub commissioning us to do a few more.
So in a way, those stories about the old library, playgrounds and other heritage sites were always there, waiting for a time they could be told.
While watching the films, something that stood out to us was the lack of dialogue. Why did you make that decision?
The stories as I wrote them really did not require any dialogue. Often the stories are about states of mind and quite observatory in nature; based around universal experiences and memories. It’s much more interesting for the viewer to bring his or her own thoughts and personal history into the experience.
The music is therefore important as a language we all understand, but can’t always explain why it makes us feel a certain way. I hope it is the same with these films.
Is there a particular message you want your audience to take away from the films?
I don’t have any embedded messages in these films, really. I think they evoke different sentiments and feelings depending on your taste, age, personal history and maybe how long you’ve lived in Singapore. For me, they’re simply about life, which is neither happy nor sad, but bittersweet.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in the process of the production?
The bigger challenges were more production-related — schedule, budget, etc. Achieving a fairly high level of accuracy with many architectural and environment details while still maintaining a stylised aesthetic was also difficult.
Little Red Bricks took the longest time to complete largely because of the amount of research needed and the high level of detail we wanted to achieve with the old library building for both its exterior and interior, and over different time periods.
How do you feel about the Northern Film Group acquiring the rights to distribute Timescapes overseas, particularly outside of Asia?
It’s great and really encouraging. These films were made for Singaporeans and I never had any real expectations that they can do much business overseas. Hopefully, the underlying ideas of love, life and loss in some of these stories can resonate with international viewers as well, even if the many Singaporean landmarks have no inherent meaning to them.
You chose to adapt The Violin into a full length feature film. What can we expect from the adaptation?
The project, which is titled The Violinist, has actually been in development for over 2 years, pre-dating Timescapes. We’re making some progress on the financing side and with some luck, we can hopefully start production later this year.
The Violinist is inspired by the short film rather than a straight adaptation, and tells a love story set mostly against wartime and post-war Singapore.
I think it has the potential to be a unique Singaporean film, and my hope is that Timescapes and other similar projects can raise the profile of our animation industry and empower more local filmmakers to see animation as a medium to tell stories for all ages.
What are your plans for the future, for Timescapes or otherwise?
I hope to tell the other 20-odd stories from the original list, however long it may take! The idea is to keep adding to the anthology to become a treasury of animated films about Singapore for generations to enjoy. Animation generally has a long shelf life, so that is the dream.
The challenge is finding the resources, especially financing, to do this. We don’t really have an animated film industry in Singapore, so the ecosystem as a whole is quite unfamiliar with animation as a medium and generally perceives it as a high-risk venture targeted primarily at children.
There is thus relatively less interest and investment that go into animation projects currently, but we’re hoping to slowly shift the conversation by showing that animation can be used to tell stories for all ages and ultimately, in the right hands, local animation has the potential to stand apart and find its own audience.
I hope the work we do at Robot Playground Media can not only fulfil our own storytelling ambitions but also help open the doors for local animators.
Click here to watch the Timescapes anthology.
