
Discordance is a stop-motion animation that explores the relationship between the mediated information about others that we receive indirectly, how we experience them personally, and who we believe they are. The video depicts vignettes from the life of a former friend of the director, whom she has known since childhood. The story is a collaboration between Sao Tanaka and Wanxin Wu. Tanaka wrote each scene’s details, and Wu composed and edited those narratives as one sequence.
Discordance has been assembled by gathering fragments of images, recordings, memories, and speculation of the director's former friend and those around her. The images of the background and characters are printed on mulberry paper. Utilizing the transparency of the papers, the images were layered to depict depth in the scenes. The masks of the characters not only impede their identification and keep them anonymous, but they raise the question of personhood, as the etymological meaning of the word "person" (persona) is, in the theatrical sense, a mask.