The Making of Temporality
STILLS
TEMPORALITY
ANIMATED DOCUMENTARY
The idea for Temporality began with a question that philosophy has grappled with for centuries: what does it mean to live in awareness of death? I wanted to explore how people internalize and respond to the inevitability of their own dying - I was interested not in answers, but in tensions - between fear and acceptance, between cultural myth and personal belief, between the abstract concept of death and the concrete experience of loss. The project took shape as an animated documentary, a medium that allowed for both literal representation and imaginative visual language, giving me the freedom to move between memory, dream, and metaphor. This reflected how we actually think about death, often indirectly, emotionally, and through symbols - the goal wasn’t to explain death but to sit with it, to draw out its strange presence in our lives, and to ask why, despite its certainty, we remain unsettled by it.
Ultimately, Temporality is about our attempts to locate ourselves in the face of something unlocatable. It doesn’t seek resolution but offers companionship - through voices, visuals, and the shared human experience of wondering what comes after. It is both a personal and collective reckoning with death, filtered through the lens of animation and philosophy, where temporality itself becomes a subject: how we move through time, how we remember, and how we face the end that shapes all beginnings.
Directed, animated and edited by me
Softwares used : Adobe Audition, AfterEffects, PremierePro, ToonBoom Harmony, Photoshop
The backbone of Temporality was a series of interviews I conducted with people of different ages, backgrounds, and relationships to death. I recorded hours of audio - conversations that were intimate, meandering, sometimes contradictory. The editing process became an act of philosophical curation: listening closely not just for what was said, but for the pauses, the shifts in tone, the places where language faltered under the weight of feeling. From these hours, I began to thread together recurring themes - mourning as a process that doesn’t resolve so much as evolve; the fear of being forgotten; and the myths we use to contain the unknowable, from religious visions of the afterlife to childhood beliefs in ghosts. In the final structure of the film, I allowed these voices to guide the rhythm of the narrative, interspersing moments of silence and abstraction to let their words resonate. The visual choices - shifting linework, dissolving forms, layered textures - mirrored the instability of memory and the impermanence at the heart of the film’s subject.