TEACH A MAN TO FISH
An animated documentary about a Filipino father, the life he recorded, and the legacy his son is learning to preserve.
After my father passed away in 2023, I began reading the memoirs he had spent years writing and realized how much of his life I had never fully known. Teach a Man to Fish is my effort to preserve that story through illustration, animation, family photographs, personal artifacts, and his own words. It follows a life shaped by Angono, war, the U.S. Navy, migration, family, and resilience—and my own journey to understand the legacy he left behind.
The Journey
Angono → Japanese occupation → fisherman’s son → U.S. Navy → America → fatherhood → legacy
VISUAL DEVELOPMENT
Character Design & Model Sheets
Background Concept Designs
The Fisherman
The Fisherman began with one of my father’s poems from his book Buhay Sa Angono—Life in Angono. I adapted his words into an animated short, using illustration and motion to bring one of his memories of Angono to life.
Looking back, it feels like an early version of what I am trying to do now with Teach a Man to Fish: take the stories my father left behind and give them a visual life of their own.
The film later aired on HBO On Demand and remains an important example of the kind of intimate, culturally rooted storytelling I want to continue with this project.
