SHORT FILMS

Sonic Storytelling Through 24-Hour Constraints

Chaeyeon Kim · 2024 – 2026

Composition · Sound Design · ML Audio · Direction · Performance

TL;DR

Four short films where music and sound design are narrative language. Across all four, the score is the film’s psychology, with instruments assigned to characters, ML models standing in for impossible casting, and structural motifs (Morse rhythm, de Broglie wavelengths) carrying meaning dialogue never states.

Two of the four have been recognized at the Minervopolis Film Festival.

THE PHILOSOPHY

In my films, composition, performance, and technical innovation are a single practice. Four commitments follow from that:

  1. 01

    Composition informs narrative

    Leitmotifs represent character psychology.

  2. 02

    Technical constraints drive creativity

    ML models become the solution to problems that are otherwise impossible inside a 24-hour window.

  3. 03

    Sound design is storytelling

    It supplements and improves dialogue.

  4. 04

    Hyperinstrument philosophy

    Applied past the boundary of the traditional instrument: TTS models, sound-design systems, and biometric tools treated as instruments that “understand” and amplify a human psychological state.

01 · Before You Learned to Forget

2026 · Golden Owl Award — Minervopolis Film Festival 2026

Composer · Writer · Director

A woman frozen in time while the world rushes past rediscovers her childlike wonder through a series of “missions” delivered by a mysterious voice on a payphone. The voice turns out to be her own past self, embodied as an animated caterpillar that only she can hear… a being that, in its own eyes, sees butterfly wings already growing from her back.

The conceptual spine: physics as emotional language

The narration threads physics through the emotional arc.

The music

  1. 01

    Meter & tempo

    The film rocks between two bars of 3/4 and a bar of 4/4 at 100 BPM, looping that asymmetric pattern until the instrumental break, a rhythmic stand-in for a character who feels one beat out of step with a world moving in fast-forward.

  2. 02

    Harmony that floats instead of resolves

    The tonic is dressed as Dmaj7, Dmaj9, Dadd9. Strong dominant-to-tonic (V–I) motion is deliberately avoided so the music hovers on tonic prolongation rather than pushing toward resolution: coloristic, ambient, pastoral.

  3. 03

    The signature move

    The film’s fingerprint is a C♯ sonority built on the leading tone: voicing the note that wants to resolve to D as a shimmering, suspended color that pulls home without ever committing. What makes it the signature isn’t the chord itself but how differently it’s staged at the two ends of the film.

Beginning / Climax

Hover or click to hear each C♯ voicing. The C♯ stays in the same place on both axes — from alone to surrounded. The unresolved leading tone is constant; the loneliness around it changes.

02 · FLUSH! The Flowers

2025, Buenos Aires · Best Audio Award — Minervopolis Film Festival 2025

Writer · Producer · Composer · Actor

A character-driven psychological drama built on an instrument-as-identity system — the film’s central sonic idea, and the reason it took the festival’s audio prize. Each character is an instrument family, and their music behaves the way they do:

The drama plays out not just in what the characters say but in how their instruments interact — when strings crowd out the flute, when the flute is left alone in silence. The mix is the subtext.

Instrument-as-identity

Click a card to play that leitmotif. Click the other to add it on the shared timeline — the voices snap into the running bar rather than starting over. When both play, the mix stays HARMONY until 0:19, then DISSONANCE.

03 · STOP !

2025, Taipei

Co-Director · Writer · Composer · Actor

A 24-hour film built around a set of constraints turned into a structural or sonic device.

Constraint Solution
Must be made in under 24 hours Full write–score–shoot–cut cycle in one day (Project Management)
Must feature Gordon Ramsay Built Ramsay with a machine-learning TTS voice model
Must feature a fortune cookie “Dirt” made from crushed cookies, message hidden inside
Must say “I wish I were on Jupiter” Jupiter = the subconscious

The music

Decode the title

(S · T · O · P)

Click to play the 24-hour voice on a loop. Dots and dashes light from the Echolocation MIDI notes, in sync with the audio — · · · / — / — — — / · — — ·

04 · How Have You Been Feeling Lately?

2024, Buenos Aires

Writer · Actor · Sound Engineer · Composer

The origin point of the psychological-triptych approach: three parallel therapy narratives, each a study in how childhood trauma resurfaces as adult behavior. Sound, space, and performance operate as one integrated system.

What These Projects Demonstrate