Creative Minds In Dialogue: Visualising Time for the AAGFF

A ringing alarm, a calendar flipping its pages, or perhaps the slow dripping of sand through an hourglass: how do you see time? For the design and creative teams behind this year’s Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival, these familiar symbols merely scratch the surface of how time can be visualised. Gathered at the Festival Lounge for the ‘Creative Team Pop-up Talk’, Heesun Seo of Studio Hik (graphic design), Gemma Harrad and Ollie Rodgers of Likewise (creative videography), and Jimmy Lam of Studio Earth reflect on their interpretations of time, the central theme of this edition of the Festival.

‘It’s very difficult to show what time is visually, besides very obvious imagery like clocks,’ remarks Heesun Seo of Studio Hik, the Hong Kong-based studio responsible for designing the graphic elements of the Festival’s visual identity, brand collaterals, trailers, and merchandise. Seo’s team, including Liz Yeung and Kemina Lau, drew inspiration from Eastern philosophies of time, where it manifests fluidly as rhythmic cycles such as phases of the moon, the process of reincarnation, and the changing seasons. ‘We were thinking a lot about the idea of fluidity. Whatever fluid thing [it is], it’s not rectangular. It’s also very round because it has no seams, no borders,’ explains Seo.

To connect the passage of time with the moving image discipline, the team pays tribute to the materiality of film, breaking it down to the medium’s foundations: light and movement. Exploring concepts such as slow motion and time dilation, the layers in Studio Hik’s graphics peel back to reveal an experimentation with depth. With a colour palette reminiscent of sunlight hues, the studio creates a nostalgic dance of bubbly motifs colliding softly and merging, representing motion blur. This imagery was inspired by a time when Seo had poor vision, with ‘the entire world look[ed] like an abstract painting’. The visuals are overlaid with textures reminiscent of CRT TV displays and VHS tapes, as light leaks inspired by film photography flow in and out, transitioning the works from day to night, as if to convey that a day is passing within the rectangular frames.

For Likewise, an independent media platform focused on cultural stories in Hong Kong and Asia, the task of documenting the Festival is equally abstract and challenging. The creative brief from M+ was to make it fun, something along the lines of ‘an ice cream melting on timelapse’. The duo ventured into the streets with the intention of slowing life down to one thousandth of a second with a low shutter speed camera. As Harrad explains, ‘The whole direction we wanted to take was, “What does time look like under a microscope?”’ This allowed the duo to take on a new perspective to see how time is experienced by other sentient beings. The teasers were kept brief, featuring two to three shots that invite viewers to observe details in an urban landscape that never sleeps: pigeons flying off traditional green-tiled roofs, a hundred ping-pong balls bouncing off of a cement ping-pong table artwork, and a quintessential streetscape in Sham Shui Po.

During the festival period, Likewise roamed around the Festival Lounge and M+ Cinema with different camera setups, including handheld camcorders and fisheye lenses, experimenting with a looser, more tactile approach to documentation. Reflecting on the results from the first day of filming, Rodgers notes, ‘Each music track could be a bit different; for this one, ambient, experimental, then lead into something more upbeat because there’s going to be DJs later,’ referring to the event ‘The Sound of Skin: A Happening’.

Regarding the AAGFF’s digital presence, Jimmy Lam of Studio Earth decided to streamline the existing website’s content structure and visual hierarchy. Notably, the team introduced a timeline view for the festival programme, making it easy for visitors to browse screenings and events at a glance. During the talk, Lam encouraged attendees to take out their phones and explore the website personally—an experience that cannot be conveyed through presentation slides. The website’s design draws inspiration from a 1970s brutalist aesthetic, with Lam describing the typography and graphics as having a ‘crude treatment’ that echoes a particular era while allowing space for the diverse visuals of the featured films. He found the process nourishing: ‘As a designer, observing each and every element created for the AAGFF website as an amalgamation of conscious choices made across multiple perspectives, big or small, is what makes this collaboration feel special.’

This ‘marriage of materials’, as Lam notes towards the end of the talk, created a cohesive visual representation that reflects the dynamism of the Festival’s curation. The intricate graphics developed by Studio Hik are works of art in their own right, providing a distinctive visual identity; Likewise’s teasers and daily recaps seamlessly connect the online audience with the city and the AAGFF; and Studio Earth’s web interface design offers users an intuitive way to navigate the Festival’s digital realm. With time being both an individual and a broader, collective experience, the creatives brought in their own visual languages to interpret time, allowing their personalities to shine through. After all, time is a concept constantly moving, existing across all realms of past, present, and future creative narratives.