FOREST COSMOS (in post-production)
written, directed and scored by Chooc Ly Tan
3D animation by Eunjo Lee
4K, 16 minutes
Film completion: Fall 2026
Accompanying EP release: 29th January 2027, on Chinabot
Re-recording Mixer: Panos Chountoulidis
Captions: Eleanor McDowall
FOREST COSMOS is the first film in The Earth Is Speaking, an ongoing interdisciplinary project bringing together moving image, music and writing to explore how futuristic ecologies might sound, feel and be imagined. The project takes its name from words spoken by indigenous activist Txai Suruí, from the ancestral lands of the Paiter Suruí people in the Amazon rainforest: 'The Earth is Speaking’. The series comprises three short 3D-animated films, each paired with an original music release. I write, direct and score all three.
The film is set in the near future, in a rainforest. It follows a Vietnamese mantis and a human with living sea anemone hair as they move through a landscape of eye-popping botany. The story investigates natural nonhuman phenomena — symbiosis*, crypsis**, bioluminescence — alongside themes of ongoing colonial exploitation and trauma at many different scales.
The story is saturated with references to the distant past and the far future, the microscopic and the cosmic. It is an optimistic film in which the extractive exploitation of nature is overcome, but it is not a naive return to the pristine wilderness. Instead, it is an exercise in critical world-building, asking what forms of life might emerge from the ruins of capitalist destruction.
FOREST COSMOS introduced a new methodology for my own practice: using moving image as a visual annotation for music composition — treating the film itself as a music score. Rather than composing music to illustrate the image, I let the image directly shape the composition's sounds, rhythms and processes. This approach enabled me to converge different strands of my practice in one project: moving image, world-building and music production.
The EP scores FOREST COSMOS. Rather than functioning as conventional film music, it operates as an expanded sonic environment that interacts with the film's speculative world-building. Throughout, I worked to translate rainforest life and phenomena into a sonic landscape that moves from micro-listening to cinematic scale. Sound composition provides a sensorial method for engaging with ecological thinking: through recording, improvisation and digital transformation, natural forces are rendered as sonic environments that invite listeners to experience ecological processes differently.
The experimentation in the score pushed my practice further than it had gone before: voice as instrument and for sound design, subverting foley through unexpected sound-image associations, turntablism as compositional technique, granular processing, musique concrète pushed to unanticipated places. The Korg Monotron mirrors a praying mantis's movements. Keys through overdrive become an apocalyptic tremor. My voice, amplified and pitch-bent, becomes turbulence or the scream of many dispossessed spirits. Field recordings go in raw or come back unrecognisable. My music synthesises the worldly and the unworldly — concrete noise with abstract sound, classical instrumentation with frenetic beats, intimate vocals with alien soundscapes. An attempt to think differently through music, to imagine another possible world.
Emotion plays an important role in this process. By mobilising affect within the music, the work seeks to echo the listeners' sense of interconnectedness with the natural world, while foregrounding the gravity of ongoing colonial aftermaths and the urgency of addressing these forces at both systemic and environmental levels.
To expand on the film's conceptual and discursive scope, I have commissioned five writers to respond to FOREST COSMOS: Hannah Catherine Jones, april forrest lin 林森, Jacob V Joyce, Sam Sivapragasam (LION), and Inigo Wilkins — each bringing a distinct critical perspective, from land justice and trans embodiment to sonic practice, interspecies thinking and audio-visual and institutional decolonisation.
With the support of the Art Department Research, Goldsmiths University.
*‘Symbiosis’ refers to a mutual relationship or cooperation between different species, such as when organisms depend on one another to survive.
**‘Crypsis’ describes the ability to blend into the environment — camouflage or invisibility — as a survival strategy.
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written, directed and scored by Chooc Ly Tan
3D animation by Eunjo Lee
4K, 16 minutes
Film completion: Fall 2026
Accompanying EP release: 29th January 2027, on Chinabot
Re-recording Mixer: Panos Chountoulidis
Captions: Eleanor McDowall
FOREST COSMOS is the first film in The Earth Is Speaking, an ongoing interdisciplinary project bringing together moving image, music and writing to explore how futuristic ecologies might sound, feel and be imagined. The project takes its name from words spoken by indigenous activist Txai Suruí, from the ancestral lands of the Paiter Suruí people in the Amazon rainforest: 'The Earth is Speaking’. The series comprises three short 3D-animated films, each paired with an original music release. I write, direct and score all three.
The film is set in the near future, in a rainforest. It follows a Vietnamese mantis and a human with living sea anemone hair as they move through a landscape of eye-popping botany. The story investigates natural nonhuman phenomena — symbiosis*, crypsis**, bioluminescence — alongside themes of ongoing colonial exploitation and trauma at many different scales.
The story is saturated with references to the distant past and the far future, the microscopic and the cosmic. It is an optimistic film in which the extractive exploitation of nature is overcome, but it is not a naive return to the pristine wilderness. Instead, it is an exercise in critical world-building, asking what forms of life might emerge from the ruins of capitalist destruction.
FOREST COSMOS introduced a new methodology for my own practice: using moving image as a visual annotation for music composition — treating the film itself as a music score. Rather than composing music to illustrate the image, I let the image directly shape the composition's sounds, rhythms and processes. This approach enabled me to converge different strands of my practice in one project: moving image, world-building and music production.
The EP scores FOREST COSMOS. Rather than functioning as conventional film music, it operates as an expanded sonic environment that interacts with the film's speculative world-building. Throughout, I worked to translate rainforest life and phenomena into a sonic landscape that moves from micro-listening to cinematic scale. Sound composition provides a sensorial method for engaging with ecological thinking: through recording, improvisation and digital transformation, natural forces are rendered as sonic environments that invite listeners to experience ecological processes differently.
The experimentation in the score pushed my practice further than it had gone before: voice as instrument and for sound design, subverting foley through unexpected sound-image associations, turntablism as compositional technique, granular processing, musique concrète pushed to unanticipated places. The Korg Monotron mirrors a praying mantis's movements. Keys through overdrive become an apocalyptic tremor. My voice, amplified and pitch-bent, becomes turbulence or the scream of many dispossessed spirits. Field recordings go in raw or come back unrecognisable. My music synthesises the worldly and the unworldly — concrete noise with abstract sound, classical instrumentation with frenetic beats, intimate vocals with alien soundscapes. An attempt to think differently through music, to imagine another possible world.
Emotion plays an important role in this process. By mobilising affect within the music, the work seeks to echo the listeners' sense of interconnectedness with the natural world, while foregrounding the gravity of ongoing colonial aftermaths and the urgency of addressing these forces at both systemic and environmental levels.
To expand on the film's conceptual and discursive scope, I have commissioned five writers to respond to FOREST COSMOS: Hannah Catherine Jones, april forrest lin 林森, Jacob V Joyce, Sam Sivapragasam (LION), and Inigo Wilkins — each bringing a distinct critical perspective, from land justice and trans embodiment to sonic practice, interspecies thinking and audio-visual and institutional decolonisation.
With the support of the Art Department Research, Goldsmiths University.
*‘Symbiosis’ refers to a mutual relationship or cooperation between different species, such as when organisms depend on one another to survive.
**‘Crypsis’ describes the ability to blend into the environment — camouflage or invisibility — as a survival strategy.
🔊please have the sound on!
→ 1 min. Trailer on IG for the Pre-Preview at PAF Olomouc. Enjoy the ride!
FOREST COSMOS
Short film, 4K, 16min
🧠🎻written, directed and scored by Chooc Ly Tan
💫🔭3D animation by Eunjo Lee @eunjo.lee
Pre-Preview this weekend at
PAF Olomouc 2025 24th Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art Olomouc, Czech Republic December 4 - 7, 2025 @pafpafpafpafpafpafpaf
at « Mirages », a series of screenings programmed by @A_____Z
An EP of the score will be released next year 2026 on the Chinabot @chinabotasia label with the support from the Art Department Research, Goldsmiths university @artresearchgold
Short film, 4K, 16min
🧠🎻written, directed and scored by Chooc Ly Tan
💫🔭3D animation by Eunjo Lee @eunjo.lee
Pre-Preview this weekend at
PAF Olomouc 2025 24th Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art Olomouc, Czech Republic December 4 - 7, 2025 @pafpafpafpafpafpafpaf
at « Mirages », a series of screenings programmed by @A_____Z
An EP of the score will be released next year 2026 on the Chinabot @chinabotasia label with the support from the Art Department Research, Goldsmiths university @artresearchgold
