木
Wood (Tree)
Coming soon
明月光
We make short animated documentaries about ancient China, told through Chinese characters. One character per episode. Where the character came from, and the people who lived around it.
From 山 shān
Tea porters on the night road
The films
One character, one film
A character is a small piece of evidence. It was drawn by someone, for something, a long time ago. We start there and go and look at the people it came from.
New release
火 huǒ, fire
How we work
The character is the way in
The films are short. They are drawn and animated, not archive footage.
What we keep coming back to is the people. Someone walked that road at night with a load on their back. That is the part we want to draw.
Who makes them
Two people
We are not animators. Mark works in software, Natasha is an artist and designer, and the films are something we make in the evenings because we enjoy them. There are stories here that are genuinely good and that almost nobody in the West has heard, so we go and read the sources and publish what we find with its citations. The animation is made with Grok Imagine from Natasha's hand-painted ink artwork. It is how two people finish a twenty five minute film at all, and we are not claiming it is professional animation. The story is the thing, and the pictures are there to carry it. We live and work in Guernsey.
Natasha K. He
From Guiyang, in China
Natasha shapes the artwork’s direction and style, influenced by Chinese ink painting; Natasha designs the sets and the staging, works on the research behind each story, and runs everything the films do online.
Mark Flynn
From Manchester, in the United Kingdom
Animation and music. Mark builds the films out of Natasha’s artwork, using AI tools for the motion, and cuts them together.
The voice
Nicky Yue
Nicky reads the films. She is the voice on every episode, and she helps with the work behind them.
She is not a person. Nicky is made with AI, and Natasha drew her so that the narrator would be someone rather than something. We would rather say that plainly than have you wonder.
Where the films live
Watch on YouTube
The films are free and they are all on the channel. Subscribing there is the thing that helps most, because it is how the next one finds people who have not heard of us.
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The list
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