Going the Distance (2005)

The short film, Baggage, began with black-and-white Super 8 footage in a style that is directly scanned from the film strip with unedited black spots and sprocket holes, and it’s framed with white strips and photo corners. In this section, someone received a package of an old-fashioned leather briefcase wrapped in the kraft paper. With their attire and face revealed later, this person is presumed to be a young woman. After the case was opened, a series of small objects—photos, boxes, glasses, paper, and a knife—were carefully displayed like a tiny cabinet of curiosity. She inspected the various objects lying inside. Inside a box, she found a unique small sculpture: a posable figure model with avian characteristics in its head and a skeleton of a wing. She also discovered a photo with this figure and a key. This figure and the key were key visual elements guiding this adventure throughout the film.

Instead of a still image, moving images in the similar style of the Super 8 footage are shown with an intricate photo frame in the center of this briefcase, showing a tramway passing by. The film cut to the full screen of this moving image, and the title “BAGGAGE” was engraved in the carriage of the tram as the title card. The film transformed into a colorful 3D animation with a high frame rate afterwards, in contrast to the Super 8 footage before. Filled with trippy purple and red colors, the animation seems to mainly be from the point of view of a person strolling along empty town streets at night. The streets have stone walls, short buildings, abandoned shops, wooden doors, lightened streetlights, and lightened signs. The woman was walking down the streets with the leather briefcase in her hand and peeking through the shop windows. On the TV screen, images of various baggage and the woman’s face are shown. She entered a hotel with a dead end and saw an eerie tableau of different moving puppets in a toy shop. Different piles of suitcases stood in front of empty shops and inside empty cars. These animations are overlaid with different footage of each other and live action. The discontinuity of dimensions and repeated elements visualized the inner journey of one visiting the museum of their personal fragmented memories from a long time ago. The residual stores are similar to the ruins of the emotional burden that piled up and was left behind throughout the years.