In the early 1990s, Bong completed a two-year program at the Korean Academy of Film Arts. While there, he made many 16 mm short films. His graduation films, "Incoherence" and "Memories in My Frame", were invited to screen at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and Vancouver International Film Festival. Bong also collaborated on several works with his classmates, which included working as cinematographer on the highly acclaimed short "2001 Imagine" (1994), directed by his friend Jang Joon-hwan. Aside from cinematography, Bong was also a lighting technician on two shorts—"The Love of a Grape Seed" and "Sounds From Heaven and Earth"—in 1994. Eventually, he suffered severe hardships for more than ten years while working on film production. In his early stages as a film director, Bong received a meager salary of 1900 dollars per year (US$3800 = 4,500,000 won per two year). It was hard for him to make a living and he barely made enough to buy rice, so he had to borrow rice from his university's alumni.