7. eat up! (dir. yuxin cao)
UPCOMING / SHORT
“Nostalgia for an era that didn’t exist”
Eat Up! is a cross-Chinese language sci-fi comedy, set in an Australasian future. Family, memory and nostalgia are key themes, which required for it to be a retro sci-fi. Thus, one of the biggest creative decisions was to find the right tone and visual language for its worldbuilding.
This led us to the question: What does retro sci-fi mean for East Asians? What might an optimistic sci-fi look like beyond solarpunk?
After months of research, we broke away from the go-to mid century modern and cyberpunk tropes commonly used in sci-fi, and landed on the specific aesthetic of 80’s city-pop music to convey a nostalgia fundamentally rooted in East Asian cultural memory.
We delved deep into the work of bubble-era architects Shiro Kuramata and Kenzo Tange to uncover the shapes of this world.
You can view more from this aesthetic here:
with thanks to crew:
director - yuxin cao
producers - emily bull, denis curnow, neisha dallamora
story by - yuxin cao
screenplay - roslyn zhang
dop & colourist - jesse phillips
production design, costume design, animation design & vfx design - abbey ling thorley
art dept - lily currey billyard, jordan taylor, sheree tam, ella drinkwater, elise zeman, ruby lou, craig bornstein
standby props - charli dugdale
editor - elita guo
sound - sean walker
composer - ray lin
compositor & digital matte painter - jordan spiteri