> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Edmond Yang Turned the Day He Ran From His Mom Into an AI Short - URL: https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/creator-stories/edmondyang-when-you-run-from-your-mom-ai-short/ - Published: 2026-11-09T22:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-10T11:25:07.000Z - Description: Edmond Yang (@edmondyang) wrote a newspaper op-ed in 2021 about the day he ran from his mother. In 2026 he turned it into a five-minute AI short made of paper characters and paper masks, and narrated it himself. - Author: William Smith - Tags: Creator Stories, artist profile, ai filmmaking, short film, animation, personal film, papercraft, voiceover, #medium:Animation, #method:Mixed, #handle:@edmondyang, #tool:Midjourney, #tool:Photoshop, #tool:Kling, #tool:Runway, #tool:Nano Banana Pro, #tool:Veo, #tool:ElevenLabs, #tool:Topaz, #issue-2026-11 Edmond Yang was walking home from primary school with his friends when he spotted his mother up ahead, struggling with two heavy bags of groceries. He could have run up and helped her. Instead he slowed down so she wouldn't see him, because he was too embarrassed to say hello to her in front of them. He wrote about that walk in 2021, in [an op-ed for the Norwegian newspaper VG](https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/nw6jOL/naar-man-loeper-vekk-fra-sin-mor?ref=thedaringcreatives.com). Five years later he turned it into [*When You Run From Your Mom*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUzuLkmWDKE&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), a five-minute animated short he made with AI and narrated in his own voice. He calls it "A very personal piece, also voiced by myself," and it plays that way. Every choice in it, from the folded-paper characters to where the focus lands in a shot, is there to tell that one memory, which is what makes it worth taking apart. Edmond is a Norwegian designer who grew up in the suburbs of Oslo, and most of what he posts [on his YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@edmondyang?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) and [as @edmondyang on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/edmondyang/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) is funny. Next to the viral clips there's an award-winning short and a run of commercial work, which makes a film this quiet and this close to home stand out even more. Edmond Yang — *When You Run From Your Mom*, on YouTube (@edmondyang) ## Where the story comes from His family is Hong Kong Chinese. His father moved to Norway at 11, and his mother followed after they married, in 1981, the year Edmond was born. On the [DayOff Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6noPWXV4Sw&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), recorded in June 2025, he remembered being basically the only Hong Kong Chinese kid at his school, and being bullied a lot for it. The film fills in what that felt like. He stuttered in class, the other kids laughed, and so he stopped raising his hand. A girl hit him on the head almost every day. At home the family watched Chinese TV together, which he loved, but it pulled him even further from what the kids at school thought of as normal. So he made himself a different face for school. "I created a mask. A Norwegian mask," he says in the film, and the rest of the story grows out of that line. ## How the narration is built He starts in the present, over a crumpled paper mask lying on a basketball court, with a list: "The fear of not being good enough, the fear of sticking out, the fear of being pointed out, and laughed at." Then he describes how people see him as an adult, someone who changes his voice and attitude depending on whether he's speaking Chinese, Norwegian or English, "Like wearing a different mask for different situations." By the time the childhood part begins, you already know what the mask stands for. From there the story runs in order, from the schoolyard to the classroom to the sofa in front of the Chinese TV, until he makes the mask. It works, a little, and gets him what he calls "the kind of friends you get with a mask." The grocery bags are the turning point. His mother stops, sees him and smiles, and she's about to call his name, so he runs. Hearing it in front of the others would have broken the mask: "I didn't want to expose my name." The last minute brings him back to the present. "Over the years I got a very comprehensive collection of masks," he says, and these days he sees all those cultures as something that lets him see more. He said the same thing on the podcast, where he put it as "fitting out was a sort of superpower." The film ends on what he wishes he could tell that boy now: "You'll be fine." ## A world made of paper Everyone in the film is folded paper. The heads are faceted like origami, the hair is a few sharp black folds, and the mask is a blank paper face with a smile drawn on in marker. In one shot you watch him draw it. ![A paper boy holds a paper mask with a smile drawn in marker over his face, in an orange bedroom](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4b/dc/4bdc4be6-5abc-4e80-986d-59016a3f1831/content/images/2026/11/edmondyang-mask-still.jpg) The Norwegian mask — from Edmond Yang's *When You Run From Your Mom*, via YouTube (@edmondyang) The sets look like miniatures you could pick up off a table. His bedroom is 1980s orange and teal, with a beige computer, a stack of paper and video game posters on the wall, while the family watches Chinese TV on a second CRT and the schoolyard sits in low, golden light. That warmth drops out for the grocery scene, which happens in grey snow, so his mother's pink puffer jacket is the brightest thing in the frame. She comes back in the last shot, walking the same snowy street older, with lines folded into her paper face. By then the one mask has become a whole box of them, each painted a different pattern, which is the "collection" from the narration laid out on screen. ## Where the focus goes Almost every shot has a very shallow focus, where one thing is sharp and everything around it melts away. That's how a real tabletop set looks through a close-up lens, and it's a big part of why the paper world reads as objects sitting in a room. He also uses focus to carry you from one beat to the next. After a shot of his mother on the phone at her window, the schoolyard opens completely blurred and only sharpens on him, standing alone, as he admits he used to tell her he'd been with friends. The grocery scene is where it pays off. His mother stands in the snow, sharp, and smiles at him. Then he and his friends step into the foreground, and she goes soft behind them right as he runs, so the camera stops looking at her at the moment he does. ## The sound The narration carries the film, and he recorded it himself, in English. The description thanks [Ketil Schei](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IHIrvmW2N0&ref=thedaringcreatives.com) for the sound mix, and Schei also did the music and sound design on Edmond's earlier short, *The Granniest Grandma*, though the description doesn't say who wrote this film's score. The mix drops almost to silence a few times in the first minute, the last one just before the childhood section begins. It dips again as the boy runs from his mother. ## How he works On the DayOff Podcast he talked through his process. He has used Midjourney since its closed alpha test, and he still prefers it because he knows how to get what he wants out of it. He generates each shot as an image and rewrites the prompt when one isn't right, asking for a close-up instead of a wide, say. If a generated image has something in it he doesn't want, "I will put that image into Photoshop and just remove it." Once he has around 20 images he likes, he moves them into a video tool like Kling or Runway and prompts the movement shot by shot. The *When You Run From Your Mom* description doesn't list its tools, but his December 2025 short, *The Granniest Grandma*, does. He used Nano Banana Pro for the images, Veo 3.1 for video, ElevenLabs for the voices and Topaz Astra to upscale, with Christian Wieberg-Nielsen on colour and Schei on music and sound. He even built a companion game for it with Google AI Studio. Edmond Yang — *The Granniest Grandma*, on YouTube (@edmondyang) On the podcast he also explained why he thinks his work stays his, pointing to all the films and music he's taken in over the years: "my taste is unique and that cannot be replaced by AI. So everything I make is with my taste." ## Before the AI films He has been a freelance designer since he was 17 or 18, and a lot of that early work was album covers for Norwegian musicians. He started his first company at 18 and built websites for big companies in Oslo in the early days of the web. He was testing Midjourney's closed alpha in 2022, around the time he closed down a company, which he said left him with a lot of time. The funny clips came first, and they're still a big part of his channel. His first serious short, [*One Last Wish*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSCgdR6O-A8&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), was made in 48 hours for the Cinema Synthetica Norway 2024 challenge, with Erlend Loe writing, Simon Valentine directing, Alex Holm on edit and sound, and Edmond on the AI visuals and animation. He says it went on to win Odyssey Season 2, an AI film competition, in January 2025. *One Last Wish* — AI visuals and animation by Edmond Yang, on YouTube (@edmondyang) These days he also leads AI work on bigger teams. On [*Hope's Ambition*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIR%5FtsoZp3U&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), a promotional film for RedNote's gala about a sheep that wants to become a sheepdog, he was the AI lead. If you liked this one, [Robert Gaudette's *A Face Only a Mother Could Love*](https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/creator-stories/robert-gaudette-face-only-a-mother-could-love/) is another AI short about a mother. ## Another recent film A few weeks before the mask film he posted [*Little Stiff — The Origin*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHo3PpdnbxU&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), set in the sewers under Paris in 1887\. A baby jiangshi, a stiff, hopping corpse from Chinese folklore, wakes up in a coffin there, which his description sums up as "A baby jiangshi, lost in a foreign city."