The Night the Lights Stayed On: how it was made

the video

Watch on YouTube ↗ · Chinese subtitles can be turned on in the player settings (中文字幕).

length: 7:39
voices: two: Ah Ma (93) and her granddaughter Mei (8)
pictures: 25 watercolour scenes, plus real film from December 1941

why this story

Peace in Singapore feels permanent. On 7 December 1941 it felt that way too. People went to the market, children played five stones on the five-foot way, families ate dinner with the street lights on. Everybody said Singapore was a fortress. A few hours later the bombs fell.

I wanted to tell that night the way a grandmother would tell it at bedtime, on the safest night of the year. The film opens on reunion dinner, lo hei and an ang bao, then goes back to a Sunday that was just as ordinary.

“That Sunday, everybody also said, nobody can touch us. Same sky. Same lights. Don’t take it for granted.”

what is real and what is not

Ah Ma, Mei and the neighbours are made up. The raid is not.

Shortly after 4 am on 8 December 1941, 17 Japanese navy bombers attacked Singapore. Bombs fell on Raffles Place and Chinatown, and on the airfields at Seletar and Tengah.
61 people were killed and 133 injured.
Some people thought it was a drill. Some who phoned the authorities were told it was only practice.
Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942, the first day of Chinese New Year. That day is now Total Defence Day.

Two details come from a single account each, so Ah Ma tells them as her own memory: the street lights being on (Frank Owen) and the sirens sounding after the planes had gone (an oral history at the National Archives of Singapore).

Ah Ma’s neighbours are not counted among the real 61. An early draft did that, and I took it out.

how it was made

1
Find real film. I searched the Internet Archive for public-domain footage of Singapore in 1941, then read each reel’s catalogue card instead of trusting the upload’s label. One “US Army” reel turned out to be a British newsreel. The Australian War Memorial film didn’t match its own description, so I used only the shots I could confirm and left out every shot of casualties.
2
Check the facts. Times, numbers and places were checked against the National Archives of Singapore before any line was written.
3
Write it as a bedtime story. No narrator. Only Ah Ma and Mei speak.
4
Give them voices. Ah Ma is a Singapore auntie voice in Fish Audio, with emotion tags for the parts where she stops or whispers. My first voice for Mei measured at a man’s pitch, so I replaced it.
5
Paint the memories. 25 watercolour scenes in Google Flow, with plain cast sheets so the family kept the same faces. Loss is shown through an empty cradle and a tray of kueh, never bodies.
6
Build the sound. Bombers, the siren and the bombs sit under Ah Ma’s voice, with music from ElevenLabs.
7
Edit with scripts. Every clip, subtitle and picture is placed by a script from the length of the voice lines, so a re-voiced sentence moves everything after it.
8
Check and fix. Whisper transcripts caught wrong words, and a frame-by-frame measurement caught a slight judder in the slow camera moves, which I fixed in the fourth cut.

what I’d do next time

Record real family voices for the Hokkien lines. The AI voice couldn’t say “Huat ah!” (it came out as “Hello”).
Film Raffles Place at night on a phone for the ending: same place, same sky.

the song

Hold My Hand 牵着我的手 is a lullaby duet made from the film. Ah Ma sings to Mei, and her Pa sings back from 1941: he is the one who phoned for help and was told it was only practice. In the Mandarin bridge he comforts his little girl, and she passes the same words on to Mei.

Watch on YouTube ↗

length: 3:40
voices: two: Ah Ma (low alto) and Pa (baritone), picked from three sampled pairs
music: slow three-four lullaby, piano and erhu, strings in the last chorus
pictures: the film’s watercolours, with the lyrics in English and Chinese

for a small business

What carries over to a business is the method: a true story, told by one voice, turned into a short video in a day without a film crew. Small firms need that more often than they think.

1
Keep what senior staff know. Record a long-serving staff member telling how they handled a hard job, and turn it into a three-minute illustrated story for new hires. A story people can retell sticks longer than a written SOP. (More on this in Fewer hands, no first rung.)
2
Safety and near misses. Retell a real near miss with a forklift, a ladder or a wet floor the way Ah Ma tells the raid: one person, one moment, what nearly happened. It works better at a toolbox talk than a slide of rules.
3
The company’s own story. A founder’s story or an anniversary video for a family business, using old photos plus watercolours for the moments nobody photographed.
4
Onboarding in more than one language. This film is in English with Chinese subtitles. The same build can add Malay, Tamil or Bengali subtitles for a mixed team without re-editing.
5
Cheap to change. The edit is built from a script, so changing one line rebuilds everything after it. A small fix doesn’t mean paying a vendor again.

The habits matter more than the tools. Say what is real and what is AI-made, and never invent customers, testimonials or results. Check the licence on any music or footage; archive labels were wrong twice on this project. Get consent before using a real staff member’s or customer’s face or voice. Where it matters, use real voices: the AI couldn’t say “Huat ah!”, and a supervisor speaking in their own words carries more weight.

What it won’t do. Someone still has to pick the story, check the facts and watch every frame; AI cuts the production cost, not the thinking. It suits short, true, human stories. For a polished brand advertisement, an agency is still the better choice.

the tools, and what each one did

the plan: Claude: research, fact checks, script and the editing scripts
the footage: Internet Archive, Australian War Memorial, US National Archives
the pictures: Google Flow: 25 watercolours and two cast sheets
the voices: Fish Audio Drama 3: Ah Ma and Mei
the sound: ElevenLabs: music, bombers, siren and bombs
the files: FFmpeg and Whisper: mixing, subtitles, video and checks

sources

A film by Charles Tay. AI-generated voices, music and pictures; the archive film is real.