Embrace in Spring

Shawn, who’s studying overseas, comes back to China for his vacation and Chinese New Year. As time passes, conflicts start easily appear in this family, a little thing in the past could cause a “war” now. However, it’s a “silent war” - Shawn doesn’t talk to his parents anymore, and even disregards his parents sometimes. Just in this weird atmosphere, the traditional Chinese New Year comes. But due to the COVID-19 outbreak, Shawn’s parents had to go to the hospital for support. Without the accompany of his family in this New Year, Shawn learned to take care of himself and finally reconciled with his parents.

  • Hebin Cheng
    Director
  • Moyi Zhu
    Writer
  • Nian Li
    Producer
  • Yongliang Lin
    Key Cast
  • Xizi Zeng
    Post-Production
  • Project Type:
    Short, Student
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 4 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 11, 2020
  • Country of Origin:
    China
  • Country of Filming:
    China
  • Language:
    Chinese
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    Yes - The University of Sydney
Director Biography - Hebin Cheng

Hebin Cheng (Hobin) is a filmmaker and photographer based in Guangzhou, China. He is a photography blogger @hobin-mk813 on weibo China. His photography works have attracted extensive attention from the Internet and major media. Among them, the representative photography work "Twelve hours in Guangzhou" ranked fifth in the top trending search list in 2020, with more than 120 million views.
“Have you ever seen the candy-colored Guangzhou?” This is the title used in many media interviews and reports in October 2020 after he got on the top trending search list on weibo. News is all about his photography works of his city. Soon after those broadcasting, he is known as one of the youngest photographers in Guangdong.
Hobin is also China National Geographic co-photographer, Canon's official co-photographer and lecturer, and was invited by Canon to conduct personal offline photography courses in March 2021. He served as the official photographer of Guangzhou Marathon for three consecutive years from 2018 to 2020, and opened the feature "Guangzhou Marathon Group Images".
Hobin has his own unique vision into not only images, but also films. Since Hobin got his own camera in age of 16, he had great interested into films. He filmed short films with his friends when he was still in high school in 2013. His early short film works have won local and domestic film festival awards, and Brat (2017) was shortlisted for Cannes Film Festival in 2018.
In the graduate project of the University of Sydney, such as Embrace in Spring (2020), Future or Now (2021), Causality (2021), he has always played the role of director, photographer and editor.

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Director Statement

In this project, I am the director and director of photography, and I am mainly responsible for the rough cut and some visual effects. The biggest difficulty in the whole shooting process is how to instruct the male protagonist to adjust his emotions. In the plot, the audience is not told at the beginning that Shawn’s parents went to the hospital to against COVID-19, so his emotions are hidden in his heart. This is also to pave the way for the following plot. Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai is one of my favorite directors, so this time I have referred to the style of his films, especially the lighting of indoor scenes. In order to make the picture more dramatic and closer to the retro feeling of Hong Kong films, many indoor scenes used relatively dark atmosphere light, combined with top light and face light to partially illuminate the actors. Additionally, complementary colors use both warm and cool color to emphasize the contrast and enhance the bright and prominent effect, which can make the picture more layered.