Once I made the decision to explore, my first instinct was simple: I needed far more visual material. Four photographs and a handful of blurry internet scraps were nowhere near enough to resurrect an entire campus.

Before I could even think about reconstructing the architecture, I had to get my own house in order.

Over thirty-five years of moves across cities and continents, countless original paper prints had vanished. But I had one saving grace. I have never thrown out a single negative in my life. It was that classic twentieth-century mindset ingrained in anyone who grew up with film: never discard the negatives, because you never know when you might need to reprint them.

That day had finally arrived.

Down in the archives of Wolf Architects, safely preserved in a sealed box, sat my entire youth on celluloid. Yet opening that box revealed what would become the most exhausting, tedious phase of the entire project. There were thousands upon thousands of negative strips, and I had never taken the time to organise or catalogue them. Decades of personal life, travel, family moments, and university projects were lumped together into a chaotic mountain of film.

Some plastic sleeves carried handwritten notes, but the vast majority were completely blank.

There was only one way through: I had to inspect every single strip frame by frame against the light. For several weeks, late into the evening after full days of practice, my eyes strained against tiny inverted plastic squares, searching for the telltale silhouettes of tropical concrete, familiar period fashion, or teenage faces. Out of thousands of frames, only a tiny fraction belonged to ISB.

To bring those discoveries into the digital world, I relied on an unlikely hero. Years earlier, I had bought a cheap little slide and negative digitiser gadget, originally hoping to convert old family projector slides into JPEG files. For slides, the gadget was mediocre at best, and I had buried it in a drawer convinced it was useless.

Yet when I tested it on my 35mm film strips, it proved surprisingly capable. The resolution was crisp, the dynamic range was respectable, and whenever I spotted a potential campus gem or a candid portrait of a classmate, I could scan it and feed it directly to my computer within seconds.

Even with my own archives unearthed, massive spatial blind spots remained. To fill the voids, I turned outward.

I posted an open call across our alumni groups and chats, asking anyone with old photo albums, prints, or negatives of Soi 15 to share whatever they had.

The response was sparse, but completely understandable. We live in an era where our memories are indexed on smartphones and stored in the cloud. Thirty-five years ago, our lives were printed on paper and tucked into shoe boxes, attics, or storage units across different continents. Expecting busy adults with careers and families to spend their weekends digging through cupboards to scan fragile prints was a huge ask, and I respected that entirely.

Nevertheless, several generous alumni took that time and sent through precious family album scans. Those contributors, whom I will be honouring by name in the final film credits, provided vital clues.

Even so, what lay across my desk was not a tidy architectural survey. It was a fragmented mosaic: a photo of an aged classroom window in one shot, a sliver of an open breezeway in another, a corner of a staircase, or the edge of an administration door.

This was where my architectural background became indispensable.

An architect is trained to read the invisible geometry between flat images. Rather than getting lost in the details, you look for structural logic. By calculating human scale against standard door openings, measuring vertical heights using known stair risers, and counting repetitive column spans designed for standard classroom dimensions, I could reverse-engineer the underlying layout.

Using the Photoshop workflows we rely on daily at Wolf Architects, I began stitching these disparate fragments together into basic visual foundations. I grafted a window from one angle onto a hallway from another, colour matching the weathered concrete, balancing the intense tropical light, and correcting perspective distortion.

Slowly, I began constructing a virtual storyboard. I needed to visualize how a viewer would physically journey through the space, how the narrative would flow naturally from scene to scene, and how the camera would choreograph the emotional pacing.

That process brought me face to face with the sacred geography of ISB.

Everyone who walked that campus carries a distinct spatial map etched into their soul. There were the crowded steps where friendships were cemented in the midday heat, the senior Gazebo, those legendary caged corridors lined with metal lockers, the buzzing canteen, the open sports field, the aged classrooms with their heavy timber doors and louvred air vents, and the magnificence of the Rajendra Hall.

Yet as the storyboard expanded, a harsh reality set in: how could I possibly capture everything?

The honest answer was that I could not. Some beloved corners simply had zero photographic evidence left on the planet. While generative technology could easily invent those spaces from thin air, doing so felt wrong. Like a palaeontologist holding fifty per cent of an authentic dinosaur fossil, you can plaster cast the remaining half and call it a genuine reconstruction; generating a complete skeleton out of pure imagination is simply fiction. I needed consistency from scene to scene, and every space had to originate from physical proof in a photograph.

Beyond historical integrity, there was the cold reality of time and resources.

This was a solo passion project executed late at night when I should have been sleeping. I am not a massive studio with an army of animators and endless computing budgets. I had to rely on accessible, affordable AI tools, and I deliberately chose not to use heavy architectural CAD software to manually model entire virtual buildings.

Those limitations turned out to be a blessing. Given my natural obsessiveness, establishing strict rules kept the project from spiralling out of control:

Rule 1: The Fossil Rule. Every single scene had to begin with physical evidence from a real photograph. No pure invention.

Rule 2: The 1990 Timeline Lock. Because the bulk of my core photography was captured in early 1990, every visual element had to align with that specific moment. Everything, from paint colours and furnishings to the posters pinned on the bulletin boards, had to match 1990.

This became particularly tricky when alumni from earlier classes generously submitted photos. Even across a gap of just a few years, the school transformed constantly. In my senior year, the senior Gazebo had gained a roof that did not exist previously, and the little office beside it had been painted red. Lockers were constantly shuffled and replaced. Even the landscaping evolved: where large flame trees had once shaded the steps in earlier decades, frangipani trees stood in early 1990.

Rule 3: Casting Consistency. The timeline rule extended strictly to the people. I wanted to honour my contributors by featuring them in the scenes, but if someone attended ISB years earlier, placing them beside students from 1990 would shatter the historical illusion.

Rule 4: Embrace Imperfection. The debate over resolution was significant. Modern tools can push imagery to ultra-crisp definition. But pursuing pristine clarity would only draw attention to the digital seams and slight architectural flaws of a composite reconstruction. The audience knows this is a recreation. There was no harm in letting it feel slightly handheld, as though someone were walking through the campus with a vintage video camera. This allowed me to accept small imperfections, like subtle jumps in scale or frame position between original photos of varying sizes.

Rule 5: The Five-Minute Cap and the December Deadline. When I assembled the initial timeline using strictly my own scanned photos, the rough cut ran for roughly two and a half minutes. Once I integrated the material generously sent in by other alumni, that runtime immediately doubled to five minutes. I could easily have kept expanding, but this was where project discipline became non-negotiable.

I needed light at the end of the tunnel, not just for my own sanity, but for the peace of my household. By this stage, my family was genuinely beginning to question my motives. They watched me disappear into the studio night after night, spending countless late hours on what seemed to them like an unnecessary exercise. I was not getting paid, there was no contract, no client cheque, and no architectural design award waiting at the end. Furthermore, I was an architect, not a filmmaker, even though I had by this stage experimented with creating music videos for original songs I had composed.

To stop this from turning into an endless project that would swallow my life, I locked in two non-negotiable boundaries: length and time.

The main body of the reconstruction had to stop firmly at five minutes. That ceiling forced me to prioritise ruthlessly, tightening sequences and trimming secondary moments so only the most iconic spaces remained. Together with a brief introduction and an outro to close the experience, the entire piece would land cleanly around seven minutes.

Alongside the runtime, I set a target deadline: December. It was not a rigid commercial contract date, but an emotional target. Delivering the completed film in December would make it a meaningful Christmas gift for the entire global alumni community, while giving me a clear finish line to aim for.

Within that five-minute window, my focus turned entirely to flow. Rather than getting bogged down in pixel perfection, I poured my energy into continuous motion. My goal was to make the journey feel uninterrupted, as if a camera had slipped back through time, drifting gracefully through the open-air breezeways of early 1990 to capture a vanished world still living and breathing.

Running in parallel with this visual world, a soundtrack was quietly developing in my head.

It was not just atmospheric background music; an original song complete with lyrics was taking shape, demanding to accompany the visuals. As the timeline expanded to five minutes, the music had to stretch and grow with it, matching the emotional peaks and valleys of each space. I had the words and I had the precise emotional feel, but getting the execution right turned into another massive marathon. It took hundreds of attempts, recording variations, and mixing adjustments to lock it in place.

That does not necessarily mean I am head over heels in love with the song. To be brutally honest, after hearing it looped hundreds upon hundreds of times late into the night, I grew utterly sick of hearing it. Yet every time I tried an alternative, experimenting with different melodies, chord progressions, or other vocal styles, nothing else came close to capturing the spirit of the project. Like it or not, the song and the space had become fused together.

As daunting as the road ahead still was, by this point I knew in my heart that I held a viable project. Beneath all the technical hurdles, that seventeen-year-old intuition and unyielding school spirit were still right there, cheering me forward every single day.

Because I had only attended ISB for my final senior year, this was becoming my way of not only reliving that brief, intense chapter, but expanding it and feeling as though I had truly belonged to the school for much longer.

The excitement overtook the exhaustion. What had started as a quiet, private experiment late at night in my architectural studio was ready to step out of the shadows. I took the leap and posted an official announcement to the community: the tribute film was real, and it was coming this December.

There was no turning back now. I was all in, completely committed, and the pressure was well and truly on.