“Albatross Soup,” the dizzying animated short directed by Winnie Cheung, is a lateral thinking puzzle where the objective is to determine what drove a man to commit suicide in a restaurant. We asked Cheung what started the project, how long it took people to figure out the puzzle, and what comes next for her…

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in animation and filmmaking?

I'm a self taught filmmaker with a background in editing. Earlier in my career I was exposed to animation as an assistant editor at Reel FX, an animation studio. I’ve learned a lot about storytelling through editing short films, docs and commercials since then. 

For a while I was really frustrated with the work that I was editing. I couldn’t relate to any of the stories or characters. Directing and writing came from a place of need when I realized that no-one was going to hand me a project or script that had exactly what I was looking for. It feels so silly that just a few years ago, directing didn’t even seem like an option.

2) What was the earliest seed of this project? And how did you go about developing it in the early stages?

I had been playing this riddle with a bunch of my friends and was a participant myself at one point. It was just something that got stuck in your head once you solved the riddle yourself. We’d play it at house parties, on road trips, and at bars. The more I played it, the more I enjoyed hearing the different personalities pierce through in the questions asked. I knew that I wanted to adapt this into a short film but didn’t have an exact path of execution. That’s where my background in doc, post-production and animation came in. 

Everything became an experiment of how far I could take the story. I knew that I had the means to record and edit the voices into an exciting radio cut. I illustrated as many frames as I could to create an animatic - and by illustrate, I mean draw stick figures with written descriptions. This was as far as I could develop the film before I reached out to our amazing team: Fiona Smyth - our illustrator, Masa Nakamura - our art director and animator and Dan Rosato - our composer and sound designer. They took the radio edit and my chicken scratch and fleshed it out into this colorful macabre world.

3) Can you talk a bit about the participants that you choose to try and answer the puzzle? How did you pick them, how long did each individual take to do their questions?  How many people figured it out? What were people’s overall response after they finished the game?

I played this riddle with friends who I knew would have silly streams of consciousness, but I also knew that I wanted texture in the voices. I worked with podcast producer Alexandra Young to cast additional voices that varied in gender, age and accents. That way, you'd be able to identify the participants without ever seeing them on screen. About 50 people played the riddle in groups of 5 to 6. It would normally take each group 45-90 minutes to guess the riddle, so what you see is a really compressed version of the guessing process. 

In many ways, this was an interactive way of telling a story. The riddle itself has a very strong narrative that explores the themes of survival and guilt. I think that it was really satisfying for everyone to solve the riddle because they were genuinely connected with “the man”. 

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

My friend introduced me to a book titled “House of Psychotic Women” written by Kier La-Janisse. The book is an autobiographical exploration of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films (think real life High Fidelity catalogued with female-led horror films). I’ve been watching every film listed by the book. My favorite film from the book so far is “The Entity” by Sidney J. Furie.

5) What’s next for you?

I am now developing my first live action feature – a psycho-erotic creature thriller that takes place in The Everglades about a woman in an all female motorcycle gang with repressed sexual trauma that manifests as a slimy swamp monster. It’s also quite dark with a lot of crossover themes such as guilt, shame and anthropomorphism. It’s still in the early stages, but I’m really enjoying writing the script so far.

Contact Info:

Website: https://winnith.com/

IG: @w1nn1th