Wang Shuibo was never taught how to make films. During the past four decades he has used either pencils or paintbrushes to tell stories but moviemaking has always been his big dream.

Wang Shuibo has been inspired by his homeland to make movies.

At the age of 48 and following his successful animated films and documentaries, this Chinese-Canadian is now planning to make a feature film entitled "Floating Dreams" (Fu Meng).

"I want to try a new way of telling stories instead of using pencils," says Wang Shuibo, who has been good at drawing picture-story books since he was young.

"Floating Dream tells the story of Chinese illegal immigrants to North America. It is no longer a film only about the journey of illegal migrants from China to North America. It's a film about the journey of my generation from the Red Dream to the American Dream."

Wang's dreams have been changing many times in his life.

"My biggest childhood dream was to meet Chairman Mao," Wang says. "But I was too young."

When the "cultural revolution" started in 1966 he was only 6 and could only see Mao in those short brief documentaries. "Many people of my generation at that time loved Mao more than our parents," he says. "We all believed that Mao would never die, that he was always right and never made any mistakes. I did not celebrate my birthday for several years after Mao's death because my birthday was only two days after his death and I thought it was too close.

"But when I saw him Mao was no longer great. He was only an old man lying in that crystal coffin."

It somehow shattered his childhood illusion and since then he has been searching for something to fill the void until he settled down in filmmaking.

Wang's own story is of a man who has come full circle.

Born in 1960 in Jinan, capital of Shandong province, he showed great interest in painting when he was only 2 years old and at 11 started to learn academic drawing at the children's art center in Jinan. His art teacher liked him very much, often taking him to the countryside on her bicycle to draw sketches.

In his mid-teens Wang learned traditional Chinese painting from his neighbors after school. At that time many professors and artists stayed at home due to the suspension of college education during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). "I learned traditional Chinese flower and bird paintings from Professor Wang Qihua, while learning western paintings skills from other teachers," he recalls. "They never asked me to pay. I just knocked on the door and dropped in."

When he was 16 Wang joined the army and became an army artist, creating posters and stage settings. It was there he started to make films with his drawings.

"Watching movies was one of the army's most important entertainment activities," he says.

Before the film there was usually a slide show focusing on army stories and Wang made the slides. He sketched the stories first, then reproduced them on slides and added colors, music and voice over. "It was at that time I started to do various simple special effects," he says, adding that he created the effect of smoke in his lens with a drop of blue ink in a glass of water.

In 1980, after serving four years, Wang was discharged from the army and decided to go to college. He was enrolled at the prestigious China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), majoring in comic-book and illustration. During his four-year course he never stopped sketching. His works were published in various picture-story magazines and one of them, The Tavern, received the top award at CAFA. He still remembers how he spent a month at a village in Shidu, on the outskirts of Beijing, doing sketches depicting the real lives of people in the countryside.