At university we had to prepare an initial pitch for the third week of term...funnily enough I did NOT have an idea for a long time! It is rather difficult to find the inspiration and even when inspiration hits you it's difficult to choose something suitable for the 3-minute film format...
Of course, I was stuck in this phase of having NO ideas but with too many at the same time. This was going to be a film that I'll be working on for the entire academic year - so it must sustain my dedication and interest until the final deadline! Alas, for two weeks and five days I still could not dig out a standalone idea until one cloudy day...(it may have been sunny but it's been a while since then...)
Well, it was actually an evening but I was thinking about death (as you do...) and I had all these thoughts about why we have religion and why there's so many overlapping cultural beliefs about aspects of an afterlife. Then it struck me. I had always found it strange that people believed in souls - all these ideas that even if you bring back someone's body [through cloning] you cannot bring back their soul. As another example, twins are genetically the same person - I always suggested that cousins born from twin mothers/fathers are actually half sisters/brothers but that's another story altogether! Even if twins are the same person in body, they are different people in the mind. Which leads to another thought...
I find an uncanny resemblance between our brains and a computer (ironic that in Chinese a computer in literal translation is "electronic brain"). Like a computer's HDD our brains store memory. In the heat they can grow slow and sluggish, too much new information may require removal of old information to create space. We have short term memory like RAM, doing too much at once may cause us to "crash" and staying "on" for too long can cause all sorts of problems. Hard knocks may delete our memory entirely (or partially...) but I'll end the analogy here since I've gone majorly off-topic. The main thing I wanted to explore was, objectively thinking, our soul is just a memory - or rather, a collection of our own memories mixed with the memories that other people have of us. The things we experienced, how we behave, our personalities and things that define who we are - almost like a proof of our existence.
To conclude, two days before my pitch I decided I wanted to make a film that made people think about what a soul really is. One day before the pitch, it became a film that told people our existence relies on us being remembered and once we are forgotten, we no longer exist.
