How Sooyeon Shin found beauty in a bad dream

Can you tell us a little about your journey into directing?

I've loved making up stories and drawing ever since I was a child. At first, I simply enjoyed drawing, but I became fascinated by the idea that still images could be given movement and time to tell a story. That curiosity naturally led me to animation. As I continued making films, I realised that animation was the medium through which I could express my own memories and emotions most honestly.

The film grew from recurring nightmares involving animals that seemed to resent you, which you later understood as expressions of guilt and a belated apology to a "small friend". When did you make that connection, and how much can you tell us about the memory beneath the film?

From childhood well into adulthood, I kept having recurring nightmares in which animals would appear and either torment themselves or ask me to take care of them again. The dreams were incredibly frightening, and eventually I found myself wondering, ‘Why do I keep having this dream?’

Following that question led me back to a memory I had avoided for many years.

When I was young, it was common to see people selling small animals like hamsters and chicks outside elementary schools in Korea. Around that time, I bought a hedgehog and raised her as a pet. At first, I spent a great deal of time caring for her, but as I grew older and became busier, I gradually gave her less attention.

Looking back, I realised that caring for such a small animal meant taking responsibility for almost her entire life. Living inside a cage, her world depended almost entirely on the choices I made.

At first, I simply wanted to make a film about the vague terror that seemed to emerge from my unconscious. But as I worked on the project, I realised that beneath that fear was the guilt I had carried since childhood. 

When she died, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that it was my fault. I was so frightened by that guilt that I didn't even believe I deserved to grieve. Even when I buried her, I couldn't bring myself to properly look at her one last time.

Years later, I began to wonder whether those recurring nightmares were connected to that unresolved memory. Without realising it, the responsibility of caring for a pet had become something I associated with fear.

At first, I simply wanted to make a film about the vague terror that seemed to emerge from my unconscious. But as I worked on the project, I realised that beneath that fear was the guilt I had carried since childhood. I felt that the only way to move beyond the nightmare was to face my mistake honestly, apologise, even if it was long overdue, and finally allow myself to mourn her. This film began as that act of mourning.

The images have the tactile quality of chalk or pastel worked into a black surface. What materials and processes did you use to create that texture?

Dreams always remain in my memory as something hazy and uncertain, so I wanted that feeling to exist in the texture of the images themselves.

The settings in the film are also based on the house and playground where I spent my childhood. Rather than recreating those places realistically, I wanted to create a space that existed somewhere between memory and dream.

I first experimented by drawing with graphite and charcoal, studying rough, smudged textures made by hand. Once I found the look I wanted, I recreated it digitally in Procreate Dreams using brushes that closely resembled those traditional materials, animating everything frame by frame.

Although the film was made digitally, I tried to preserve the tactile quality and imperfections of drawing by hand as much as possible.

The film follows the shifting logic of a dream, constantly playing with perspective, scale, shapes and match-action transitions. How did you translate that unstable dream language into something visually coherent, and how much of it was mapped out before you began animating?

I thought of dreams as places where emotion reshapes reality. Rather than recreating physical space realistically, I wanted perspective, scale and even form itself to constantly shift according to the protagonist's emotional state. At the same time, I didn't want those transformations to feel arbitrary, so every visual change was motivated by an emotional reason.

Before I started animating, I asked myself, ‘What would the world feel like if I were the same size as my hedgehog?’ Hedgehogs are nocturnal animals, and when I was young I used to cover her cage with a large blanket during the day. To better understand that memory, I literally covered my own head with a blanket and sat in complete darkness, listening only to the sounds around me. I first sketched those sounds before imagining the repetitive daily experiences of a hedgehog: hands reaching into the cage, food falling from above, and the constant feeling of being looked down upon.

Through that process, I realised that scale itself could become an emotional language. In reality, a human and a hedgehog can never truly meet each other's gaze from the same perspective. But in animation, simply making them the same size allows them to finally face one another.

This was my first time working so closely with sound artists throughout a film, and it completely changed the way I think about filmmaking. 

That's why, in the nightmare sequences, she appears much larger than I am, expressing guilt and fear. In scenes recalling childhood, we are the same size so we can finally confront one another as equals. In the present, everything returns to its real proportions, reflecting the acceptance of reality as it is.

Most of these ideas were carefully planned before animation began. Once I started drawing frame by frame, I kept adjusting scenes and transitions to preserve the unpredictable flow of dreams. Through that process, the rhythm of the film and its dream logic gradually found their own natural form.

With so little dialogue, the breaths, cries, music and effects carry much of the emotion. How did you work with Sanha Lee, Jiyea Lee and Eunyou Cho to build the soundscape, and did sound ever influence the animation itself?

Because the film exists somewhere between reality and dreams, it wasn't easy for me to imagine what that world should actually sound like on my own. So I spent a lot of time talking with sound designer Sanha Lee and foley artist Eunyou Cho about the physical qualities of the space: what it was made of, how narrow or enclosed it felt, whether it was damp or dry, and even what the temperature seemed to be.

Together, we gradually created a soundscape that felt both enclosed and slightly humid, somewhere between a bathroom and a cave. We began collaborating around the middle of production, and as sound was added, the world I had imagined became much more tangible and vivid.

Sound also influenced the animation itself. In the final scene, where the protagonist gently strokes her, composer Soojeong Kim and I talked about including the sound of wind. Since the scene takes place where she was buried, I wanted the feeling of a hand stroking her to naturally merge with the sound of wind brushing across the grass. Hearing those two sensations overlap helped complete the emotional shift from seeing her as an object of fear to finally embracing her as someone to mourn.

This was my first time working so closely with sound artists throughout a film, and it completely changed the way I think about filmmaking. They helped me imagine textures and sensations I never could have discovered on my own, making the world of the film feel far more alive.

Above: Sooyeon Shin at her workstation, where she brought To My Old Nightmare to life.

You directed and produced such a visually intricate film on a remarkably limited student budget. Where did those constraints affect the process most, and did they lead to any particularly inventive solutions?

The biggest limitation was time.

Since I had to animate most of the film by myself, I originally wanted every scene to be created entirely by hand, but realistically that wasn't possible. To make the production manageable, I switched to a digital workflow using Procreate Dreams.

Rather than simply imitating traditional drawing digitally, though, I tried to embrace what digital tools could offer. One area where I experimented a great deal was visualising sound. At first I tried representing sounds as completely abstract forms, while at other times I depicted their physical sources directly. After many tests, I found a balance somewhere between abstraction and representation, which ultimately helped strengthen the film's atmosphere as it moves between dreams and reality.

Looking back, those limitations weren't simply obstacles; they pushed me to discover a visual language that became unique to this film. Working alone meant a great deal of trial and error, but it was through that process that the film found its own identity.

What did making this film teach you that you'll take into your next project?

The biggest lesson I learned was that emotions I believed were too personal to be understood could, through film, resonate deeply with other people.

When I began making this film, I thought the story was so specific to my own experience that no one else would relate to it. But after completing it and meeting audiences, many people shared their own memories of guilt, loss and regret through the lens of my film.

Rather than simply imitating traditional drawing digitally, I tried to embrace what digital tools could offer.

That experience reminded me that animation has the remarkable ability to transform the most personal emotions into something universally felt.

Since then, I've tried even harder to explore feelings I once thought I could never share with anyone. My current project also begins with that same question, while focusing even more carefully on shaping the narrative so that deeply personal experiences can become stories that others recognise as their own.

What do you think this film reveals about the kind of director you want to become?

Looking back after finishing this film, I realised that I'm consistently drawn to stories that allow different moments in time to meet one another.

Whether it's the past and the present, or memory and reality, I find myself naturally creating films where times that should never intersect coexist within the same frame.

To me, animation is a medium that can make impossible encounters possible. In To My Old Nightmare, it allowed my childhood self to meet her again, making space for an apology and an act of mourning that were impossible in reality.

I believe revisiting the past in this way is what allows us to live more fully in the present and move forward. Going forward, I'd like to continue making films that begin with personal memories but create encounters across time, stories where people who could never meet in reality are finally able to do so through animation. I hope to make films that connect past and present in ways only animation can, encouraging audiences to look at their own memories from a different perspective.