reFashioned Japan release announced!
Super excited to be working with our Japanese distributors Uplink on the release of reFashioned - starting on June 9th 2023
More details to come soon...
Luminaria – a fine art collaboration with Gisèle Tchitchiama
Several months ago, I was very flattered to be approached by the French painter and collage artist Gisèle Tchitchiama with the idea of collaborating with her to create a video piece for her upcoming art show at HART HK as a part of Le French May exhibition running from May 5-17 2023. Not having worked in this format before, I was a little nervous, but immediately intrigued by her vision for the project.
The show's direction was inspired by a photograph Gisèle had taken whilst traveling in Dover, UK, looking out at the ocean through a blurry window pane set off a creative chain reaction. The title "Luminaria" frames a quest for illumination through encounters with light, fragility and the ephemeral.
Gisèle's creative process was a wonder to be a part of! As I watched her working in various mediums, her initial seed of an idea blossomed into a delicate emotional landscape of work that in turn inspired me to begin to capturing this ephemeral light in many different environments, motivated by her approach and perspective. I was incredibly moved when she played me the beautiful song she was compelled to write to accompany the film, and when Lauren Perrin, cellist with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta added his cello accompaniment to the piece, it felt like another perfect addition.
The completed film is a departure from my usual narrative style, but has been such a fulfilling explorative journey with a fellow female artist.
You can view the completed film here
Creating award winning work for HKJC
I’ve recently become fascinated with different people’s creative process and been finding a lot of inspiration from podcasts including Song Exploder and Spark and Fire which leads me to sharing some of some recent work that I was incredibly proud to have created alongside my team at Brunswick Creative for The Hong Kong Jockey Club.
The brief was to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Hong Kong, which on all fronts was potentially a complicated political and social minefield. We felt that the majority of Hong Kong brands would head for a generic “celebration film” and so we intentionally headed in a very different direction, looking back over the last 25 years of the club’s contact points with the average Hong Konger and wondering how we might draw on nostalgia to represent that extensive heritage on screen.
I came up with the idea of connecting these moments together through the narrative perspective of one individual, and decided it should be a female to come at the memories of the club from a different perspective to the stereotypical male racing fan. The club shared with us a list of significant moments from their history and I set to work crafting a story to link them all together.
Once we had a narrative and I had some key scenes in mind, with the help of my amazing editor/motion designer/animator/storyboard artists Joey Kan, we started to put them down on paper and figure out how we would transition between the moments.
From the storyboards, we then moved on to creating an animatic to help us with camera moves and transitions so we could plan shots, as well as figuring out timing to help with sound design, music and voiceover.
The filming of this campaign took place over three days and was definitely one of the most challenging yet rewarding shoots of my career! I may have been slightly over optimistic imagining that horses, babies and Hong Kong weather would all perform perfectly on cue, but the resulting footage was a testament to all our hard pre-production preparation work that no doubt enabled us to execute on a solid plan, as the storyboards and animatic are finally brought to life on screen.
I’m proud to say that the resulting campaign took home two Golds at the Transform Asia Awards!
Showcasing some of my favourite NGOS as part of a creative campaign
Brunswick Creative client The Hong Kong Jockey Club came to us with the challenge of wanting to share more about the vast range of charitable work their organisation supports, but needing to do so with a humble and authentic tone. This brief was exactly in my wheelhouse and sparked my creative vision as an opportunity to shine the spotlight on some of the incredible NGOs in the city and the heroic work they do! Since making “The Helper” documentary I’ve stayed close to a lot of the amazing people working in non-profits and I was thrilled to find several of them on the list of HKJC beneficiaries including Impact HK, Splash and more…
As I researched the different charity sectors to be included and understood the work they do, images began popping into my head, that I started to pull into a sequence of vignettes that we could stitch together using dynamic camera moves and clever transitions. It was going to be challenging to feature so many different organisations and convey their focus to an audience member in just a few seconds – but my team and I were excited to rise to the occasion and tell what we felt would be a very impactful story.
Filming saw us traversing Hong Kong from the Mai Po Wetlands to the cage homes of Sham Shui Po and many varied locations in between with our fantastic crew. We met and filmed with a huge array of people ranging from young to old including people of all abilities and we were truly amazed by the reach and impact of the projects that HKJC supports.
Our resulting TV commercial campaign brings all that impact to life in an energetic and emotional series of spots that I’m very proud of.
reFashioned is finally released in Hong Kong!
After a long couple of years of work my latest feature documentary “reFashioned” has premiered in Hong Kong as part of Movie Movie’s “Life Is Art” film festival – and we’re incredibly grateful to Edko’s Jocelyn Choi for inviting us to participate.
Find out more about the film in the SCMP article
reFashioned world premiere at Doc DMZ festival
Thrilled to announce that my latest feature documentary film will be premiering at the prestigious Doc DMZ festival in Korea!
Inspiring Girls
I was honored to be asked to be a role model for Inspiring Girls Hong Kong as they put together their video portal of specially curated content for girls in Hong Kong.
Inspiring Girls International is an organisation dedicated to raising the aspirations of young girls around the world by connecting them with female role models.
They introduce young girls (aged 10-15 yrs) to the full variety of careers and options in life - and inspire them to aim high.
Working in the film industry, it took me many years to realize my dreams of working as a director, in part because of the lack of female role models I saw working in this position. My industry still suffers from having too few women behind the camera, so I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to share my experiences with young women and girls to inspire them and help them find their way.
Everyday Heroes
When we arrived back in Hong Kong in March and watched as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the world, the global news was pretty overwhelming and heartbreaking. Like many, amidst such sadness and uncertainty, I was looking for a positive action to take.
In light of this, I randomly connected with Brad and the team at Underscore Films in Los Angeles and we set out to create a film highlighting the positive stories coming out of the pandemic. They assembled a team of 20 producers from around the world, and we started looking for incredible actions we could capture on film, remotely!
Gradually I began collecting stories to share; a friend's girlfriend in the Philippines who was giving away bags of food to people in her village who had run out, my Sister-In-Law in Italy who told me about how they were about to deliver bread and produce to a village in the Val D'Orcia that had been cut off, a local social enterprise here in Hong Kong that was delivering much needed hygiene kits to street cleaners.
As the stories began coming together, we quickly realized that this film would not just be about positivity, but instead, about the humanity in people. The everyday heroes amongst us. And I hope it inspires anyone who watches.
“My Extra Special Auntie”
One of the fantastic results of creating "The Helper" documentary was that I got to meet lots of interesting and dynamic people working in the migrant worker rights space. The NGO Enrich (featured in the documentary) had organised a screening of the film as part of an opening event to celebrate an art installation they comissioned entitled "Beyond Myself" with artwork by members of migrant domestic workers artists collective Guhit Kalay created in conjunction with Goldsmiths College, London.
I was lucky enough to be on a Q&A panel before the film screening with one of the artists exhibiting as part of the show, Cristina Cayat and we continued talking after the panel as she showed me around the exhibition that she and her fellow artists had created. I was really impressed with their diverse talents and the insightful creativity displayed in the work.
Chatting to Cristina I remembered an idea I'd had a while ago. One of my regrets with "The Helper" was that the film was unsuitable for children under the age of 11 (both because of duration and content) and so we'd really missed out on taking the film's message to the next generation of potential employers of migrant domestic workers. Given the support the film had received from schools throughout Hong Kong, I had always wondered if there might be another way to reach that audience...
The idea of creating a children's picture book that she and her cohorts would illustrate came up, and we agreed to meet to discuss the potential project...
A couple of weeks later on a Sunday afternoon, the six founding members of the group Guhit Kalay were in my office with me chatting. We talked about the major issues and difficulties they faced working for families in Hong Kong, and what they would want their young wards to know about them that they might no already be aware of.
Gradually the story's narrative began to flesh itself out; We wanted to explore the experiences of migrant domestic workers in a way that a child could understand, as the close bond between domestic workers and their wards is a unique and complex dynamic.
We felt it was important to clarify that the presence of a domestic workers within a family does not replace a parent, but that they are instead an affectionate paid employee and an individual with a family, dreams and financial goals of their own.
I got to work on a first draft of the story and the women began some initial concept artwork.
We met again on a Sunday a few weeks later (the artists one day off per week from their domestic worker jobs) and I presented my text to them, and took notes on their feedback, and they shared some initial sketches they had created.
This process continued over the course of many months and gradually refined itself down so that two of the artists took the lead on the illustrations.
Noemi Manguerra's talent as an artist was evident immediately, as she was able to create work in a huge range of mediums as shown in her immense body of work. But her instinctive illustration style became the obvious choice for our story, creating our family of characters in a very unique warm, style.
Cristina Cayat (who I had first met on the Q&A panel) took on the role of finishing and dressing the characters using her dynamic sense of colour and in-depth knowlege and passion for traditional Filipino textiles.
Over the course of a year or so, we met monthly to share progress, until finally we had a story with pictures to match and we compiled them together as a book. We also translated the text into traditional Chinese in order to be able to reach a local Hong Kong audience of readers.
We're currently in search of a publisher for the book, and were thrilled to recently be shortlisted for the Hong Kong Human Rights Art Prize.
In production…
I haven't posted any updates on here for a while as I've had my head down focused on filming a new feature documentary for the last almost year or so...
The film follows three very different Hong Kongers who are innovating in the sustainable fashion and textile space. Their stories have taken us from Hong Kong to China, Singapore and Taiwan for filming seeing fascinating things and meeting incredibly interesting people who are changing the world (hopefully) for the better.
Like every project these days - I've learned so much during production. It's been heartbreaking and incredibly inspiring and I really hope we're in the process of creating something powerful and potentially impactful!
