Contrasts

Contrasts was the final project for a Moving Images class in Spring 2023, made by three students. It went on to win the City Poems Contest — part of the Vancouver Poet Laureate 2022–2024 Legacy Project, coordinated by poet laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam and judged by artistic director Heather Haley, overseen by the City of Vancouver Cultural Services, the Vancouver Writers' Festival, and the Vancouver Public Library.

Once the poem was assigned, we drafted a shot list, storyboard, mood board, and video treatment pitch together before anyone picked up a camera.

The plan kept changing — the poem's imagery is vivid enough that there were too many defensible directions. We knew from the start we wanted a Granddaughter as the protagonist, and initially surrounded her with both a Grandmother and a Hipster character.

The teaching team pushed us to cut the cast down to two — the Granddaughter and the Hipster — for a simpler, sharper dynamic. They were right. We spent two days scouting Chinatown and shot a first draft using our own team as stand-ins.

After presenting the draft, staff and peers gave us five things to fix:

• Work on the sound design
• Increase the pacing of the graffiti scene with fast montages
• Integrate shots of food and culture
• Clearly identify the contrasting lifestyles of the two characters
• Tighten up the editing

After a week of revisions we re-shot the whole thing with the proper cast in place — Brianna Wong as the Granddaughter and Milana Umrilova as the Hipster — and reworked several shots against that critique.

Alongside directing, shooting, and editing, I handled the sound. I wanted an original score, so I wrote a simple four-chord progression and looped it through two deliberately opposed instruments: a Wurlitzer electric piano for the modern register, and a guzheng for the traditional Chinese one. The contrast in the title, carried in the scoring.

Donna Seto sent us a high-quality recording of her reading the poem, but we used the version posted on the Vancouver Public Library's YouTube channel instead — its tone and timbre sat better against the picture.

Adapting text taught me to work outside the literal description — the film's job wasn't to illustrate the poem line by line, it was to supplement it. And as director, the real skill was narrowing an endless set of possible paths down to one.

We hope our reading of Contrasts helps more people understand Chinatown's deep cultural history, and contributes to a future where the neighbourhood is revitalised in unity. Our thanks to Fiona Tinwei Lam and Donna Seto for their support throughout — we couldn't have made it without them.