Gary Yong is based out in Shanghai but draws inspiration from being remarkably well travelled having worked in Canada, the US, Thailand and Singapore. In this episode, we talk to Gary about managing projects in China as a cultural insider, his international perspective and his directorial style.
Hello, there. I’m George from Movidiam, and today we are speaking to director Gary Yong, who is on the line from Shanghai, China. Gary, good to have you on the Movidiam podcast.
Thank you, George, for having me. Thank you. Glad to be part of this.
Absolute pleasure. So you’re profiling on Movidiam, Gary, and brand identity is incredibly important in how you represent brands and create a visual narrative as communication. Tell us a little bit about your work in China and further afield.
I guess I approach brand identity not very differently from just my own goals in terms of finding my personal identity. As somebody with a more international background, trying to find a voice for that in this day and age, in the social media tools and platforms that we use, that’s sort of like a parallel narrative for both me in my personal life and trying to find a commercial outlet for that voice in my directing career. For me it’s been really a journey in trying to innovate on advertising visual language. I think part of the need to be economical about language and images in adverting forces us to rely on a lot of shorthand, a lot of shortcuts too, like signifiers. A particular series of shots, three shots might signify a certain character with a certain ethnic or cultural background, for example. We use a lot of symbolic costume and makeup in order to quickly give the audience a very clear idea without any surprises of the story that we’re trying to tell.
Directed by Gary Yong
Produced by Wallace Wang, Dao Video, Shanghai.
Sometimes we forget that there’s an opportunity in the commercial world to innovate on that language only because in the commercial world things are moving faster, so you don’t have to deliberate on it for too long. You can try something out and see if it works. Then you have all of these other demands of budget, and client expectations, and time to keep you focused. These are very controlled experiments, is what I’m trying to say.
You moved to Shanghai about three years ago, but you’ve worked internationally on music videos and independent films. You’ve shot a number of commercials for brands such as Coca Cola, Group M, and Triumph for China. How do you find those brands in China, are they creating things similar to what you’ve worked on in the US and abroad, or is there a different visual language going on there?
A lot of those projects, actually all three of the projects you mentioned were created for event use with a budget that is usually reserved for an event production such as event documentaries, or profiling, or documentation of the event. I got my start in Shanghai turning those event budgets into something more of a cinematic opportunity to do something that might look like it’s a TVC commercial production value. At the same time, because I have a little bit more time restriction to play with, because it can be longer, because it will only exist during the duration of the event and then afterward uploaded to social media, it can be a little bit more. I can explore certain aesthetic forms that maybe would have been much more difficult to get approved if I had to through an agency, a traditional ad agency model.
That’s very interesting. Because of the tools that you have and the skill set you have, you’re taking one budget and over delivering in a sense of an event film and creating something cinematic, which has got to go down well.
Right. Obviously it’s compensation for lack of something, this trying to be perfectionist when the client didn’t necessarily ask for something. Actually the timing of this podcast is quite interesting because I’m going through the challenges right now of over delivering right now on this short film that I’m working on for a Chinese lesbian social app called Rela or ?? in Chinese. They’re one of the two leading of such apps in China. Currently in Chinese, just Chinese digital world, the whole zhibo (??) or live streaming trend has caught on. Everybody is doing it. Everybody is trying to roll out their zhibo platform or channel to draw more users to their app or their platform. It’s a whole new social phenomenon because everybody has a different attitude towards celebrity now. It’s so much more accessible. You’re just kind of surprising this entire journey for me as I was doing research on how to craft a story that would be compelling and still be able to fulfil the advertising requirements of the funding, to communicate the zhibo element in the context of the Rela app, to use that as a tool between one, or two, or more female characters that are trying to communicate to each other in a lonely environment. That’s the story I’m still trying to work out.
What’s very interesting is you’re describing a process and a way of working that is very diverse and having to respond to new social phenomena, the new way people are interacting. As a filmmaker we’re thrown into these challenges. It’s a question of understanding the environment, understanding the brief, and working very closely with the team that’s commissioned the project, all things which are very challenging and change project by project. How have you seen the way that you work or the way that the industry, the global industry as a whole is changing? You’ve now got a bit of a production team. Do you work on your own as well independently? Do you work with bigger teams?
I do. I’m trying to basically secure my most flexible resources that are based in Shanghai, the leanest, most multi-tasking, effective team that is also culturally and linguistically versatile. I want to attract clients and projects that share the same attitude or worldview basically. I want to use my own personal trajectory to inform the kind of content that I make in advertising, especially. I come from an independent film background before I started my commercial career back in Asia. I went to school in North America. Going to grad school in Philadelphia at Temple University. The main thing you take away from grad school is not your MFA, it’s the notion that there’s something called the form, and that is a choice you can make as an artist. You can choose a form. It’s not invisible, even though a lot of mainstream media obviously tries to make that form invisible to us and therefore not an option. In the commercial world I think the one way that informs my process differently perhaps from other commercial directors is with this background. I tend to try and pay a lot of attention to the form that I’m trying to communicate, tell this story in.
The form that you’re describing there, that’s to do with the structure and the way that you work, or in terms of the way that you’re interpreting the world with the camera?
Mostly in terms of the visual language, I mean. This project that I’m trying to work on, I’m trying to incorporate narrative, traditional beginning, middle, and an end with an emotional climax for the audience, but I’m also trying to do this in a fashion friendly, very aesthetic, and somewhat fast-paced, visually diverse, and sexy imagery. I’m basically trying to combine certain love affairs I have with film and hoping to reach a wider audience with both something that is very visually appealing that we’re used to seeing in a television commercial, applying it towards certain stories that are less familiar to us.
Sure. How do you find that your audience, or the Chinese audience responds to that? Is there a certain of a taste very similar to those that you might have experienced with us here at Temple University?
Gary: In China because the maturation process of the industry is just a bit younger, I think irony, for example, is something that is a concept that doesn’t quite translate here. To appreciate irony you need a certain distance from what you’re going through. In China we’re still in this, everyone keeps saying, this teenager phase. When it comes to media awareness and media literacy we’re in a teenager phase in China. That’s what’s so interesting about the zhibo live streaming phenomena too, because now everyone has access, everyone has access to their five seconds of fame. They just have to hop on one of these apps that’s offering it, and they can follow us. Even in some cases they can find a living, enough to pay their rent, enough to skip out on a regular nine to five and then by virtue of some projects, such as the one I’m doing. We’re doing our casting through that very channel that we’re trying to advertise, we’re casting the talents, the three leads through users on the app. As part of the casting process they have to do certain live streaming activities. It gives them a chance to be invested in their own storytelling. They’re going to be watching the finished film on the app too because that will be the first roll-out platform.
Very interesting. The distribution is also the app.
Yeah.
Then that again is tantamount to how things are changing. It’s very interesting. As a producer, visual storyteller, you’re looking for brands that might be entering the Chinese market and wanting to build some film narrative that has the correct aesthetic and visual appeal for that audience. Is that something that you feel that you’re very well equipped to handle, for a new entrant to the Chinese market?
Well, I am Chinese, ethnic Chinese, even though I was born in Malaysia to parents that were also born in Malaysia. Malaysian Chinese have this sort of nostalgic relationship to their Chinese ancestry in the mainland. Often, we hold on to the aspects of us that are supposedly Chinese, that our families in Malaysia try to preserve, because of the social political situation in Malaysia tends to be attached to ideas and notions that you find it’s not true in modern China today. When my parents visited China for the first time, they felt so unconnected to people. What I’m trying to say is this has been a feature of my upbringing and my background. I speak English as my first language, but it’s not my ethnic tongue, which I suppose would be Chinese Mandarin. It’s not my national tongue either, which is Bahasa Melayu. Being of a certain time and age, being in this era, and being born in a certain part of the world with a certain kind of education and upbringing, we’re already aware of cultural tropes. Before we even know what that is, we’re just understanding how to fit these different parts of us together because we’re just made more aware of it.
There’s an inherent understanding there because of your contrasting upbringing and background.
I suppose, yeah. That’s how I see it. I just jump into something. Anything I’m working on, I just get obsessed about it. I’ve been in this Chinese lesbian Rela world for a little bit, trying to inhabit some of that language and make it more native to what I’m trying to create for the client.
Sure. I think that sounds actually fantastic. If I look just in your portfolio on Movidiam here, you’ve got a project for Alipay, which is obviously a huge international success story, part of Alibaba. How does working in a job like that come along? How did you find that opportunity?
That was a great opportunity through a local colleague and producer of mine, Wallace Wang. He runs a company called Dao Video Marketing. Also he gave me a certain creative freedom to explore these three basic concepts of a project that is being made for the first time by Alipay, and targeting specifically a non-Chinese, non-domestic audience. I think I took it pretty far in terms of this being the first of this kind of content that they’ve created. We shot it entirely in Shanghai, all the locations are local. It was done in two days, the entire production, two shoot days. Two of the spots were done in one day, the elevator and the office spot. Our client was trying to create work that would appeal specifically to a Russian audience or a more Russian sense of humour. The ones that you see are the English international versions. There’s Russian ADR versions of those same spots too.
I think we had some controversy with Visa. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to talk about that. We had some controversy with Visa because when the first ad came out, the cafe ad, it had a really good response on the client’s global Alipay Facebook platform and then generating something like 400,000 Facebook views in less than a week. Then Visa lodged a complaint because there is a reference in the copy to the credit card industry, which is so normal outside of China and the US, obviously, it’s part of the advertising norm. But the client got anxious, to put it mildly, and they pulled it. Since then it’s been kind of kept in the closet by them.
A slightly different ending.
Right, which is so unfortunate. I think that the production team, the actors too, they all represent a slice of what is capable at this point in time in Shanghai in terms of the international offerings that the city has to offer. They’ve been such an accurate portrayal of the state of what is happening here right now.
Writer/Director/Producer: Gary Yong | Production Agency: Untitled Collective | Post Production Sound: Boxtop Studio, Shanghai | Sound Designer/Editor: Chad Grochowski | Assistant Director: elle | DOP: Jimmy Jiang | Editor: Jeff Park | Color grading: MV Post Production, Shanghai
Very interesting, Gary. Should we move on quickly to Bad Love and the project there? Could you just tell us a little bit about where that came from and the idea? People can then check out various parts of it on the Movidiam profile if they’re interested to follow up.
Bad Love was such a pivotal project for me because it marked a turning point where I felt somewhat satisfied with the results of trying to combine those two threads that I was describing earlier, which is something that is more fashion friendly and sexy, and something that maybe a mass audience might appeal to more visually. But also use that in the service of something that is harder, or more uncomfortable, or complicated to talk about in just video, like short form video, or commercial video. There is a commercial aspect to that project, even though it may not seem so in the director’s cut. Originally the project was commissioned by our client, a Chinese singer, to promote new single release through a Shanghai agency by the name of Pivot Marketing. They found me to very loosely try and use the metaphor of bad love in the song lyrics, in the title of the song, to interpret that in any way I liked. This is what I came up with. In the original commercial version the film is book-ended by the song that we’re trying to promote.
Right. In terms of the budgets and the team size on a project like that, what are we talking about in terms of how many people you had to administer?
Bad Love, if we’re talking about Bad Love, that was a real coup in my opinion, a really successful coup. We did that in twenty-six hours straight entirely in a studio. It was cast in a matter of days, considering the casting requirements for this project. The subjects are telling their own true story, it’s not made up, it’s not written. Then these subjects had to be willing to perform, reenact their story in a way that was comfortable to them. Then on top of that I needed to absorb their stories first and then contain it in a story structure for the sake of the shooting, and then on set try elicit a fresh response from them for the camera in order to validate this documentary film-like, for it to feel real and vibrant. That was really hard, the casting. Somehow, the team, we managed to get it together in one week. We went from being green-lit by the client, to go ahead to shooting on the fourth of July last year in one week.
It’s a very big achievement, indeed. Gary, I know music videos is a particular point of interest for you. Could you tell me about your involvement with them and how you think that sort of world is changing?
I’ve always loved music video just because it’s such a place to dream. When I was younger and I watched my Britney Spears, and my Janet Jackson, and whatever. Just in general I feel like the music video art form today, for a lot of popular artists, does seem to be very unambitious. In terms of for popular music, especially for large acts, it doesn’t seem to-
Challenge the boundaries.
Yeah. It doesn’t seem to challenge the boundaries, thank you, George, like it used to.
I think it’s very interesting. I think what you’re describing is that the flexibility and the new ways of working means that there’s much more potential in the music video format. The audience actually probably respect and wants to see that. It’s with innovative individuals which can actually bring that into the market.
Yes. Especially being in China here. Let’s say the budget that would be used, it would be barely enough to cover the camera rental for a two day shoot in North America or in Europe, that budget in China could make a commercial quality music video possible. A lot of these resources are already available on the ground. What obviously needs to be brought over is the artist and the artist’s team. In the case of certain kinds of dance music, the artist doesn’t even need to be featured prominently in the music video. In terms of music video form, for sure a fertile ground like China and Shanghai is right now is ripe opportunity for creating content like that. More international artists, I hope, will see this as a place to where they can come and have the music films shot in an aesthetic way that is true to their vision. That precious artist’s vision, have faith that that precious artist’s vision can be executed. In fact it will encourage, I think, certain forms of content, I think, of subject matter. Just being here culturally in this space would help to change some hegemonies that might exist in popular music.
I understand this. It’s very interesting, isn’t it? I think these things have changed, and they ebb and flow, the stylistic approach. As you described, the new opportunities come from a new generation of people, I suspect.
Yes. With new ideas, new backgrounds.
They have a different set of experiences to the previous, more formulaic way of doing things.
Yeah. We just need to be bold enough to go through with it. I think very often we self censor. I think that’s a really frustrating process for me when I’m trying to push an idea that might have some originality through a very long channel. There are so many opportunities along the way for the idea to be attacked by a more conservative mind, who’s afraid if they don’t kill it, then the next person would kill it and would wonder why the first person didn’t do their job and kill it. We assume some things, and then we censor certain casting choices as far as the ethnic backgrounds of certain talents when they come to audition. When we mean foreign, it has to be a certain ethnic background. It can’t be somebody of Asian ancestry or other ethnic ancestries that happen to be born or raised in North America or Europe. That’s why in China, we have so much volume and such a huge user base to sustain all of the viewership of all this content, but we narrow ourselves down into these small channels. We could tell different kinds of stories, I guess.
Director: Gary Yong | Agency: Pivot | Assistant Director: Maxine Zhang | DP: Paul Wang | Gaffer: Zhao Fei | Prop master: Wang Li Guang | Post Production house: Maidou | Sound design/audio : Chad Grochowski | Color grading: MV Post
Yeah. In the light of the recent Olympics, I think, we can’t finish this podcast or conversation without talking about the Coke going for gold.
Right. Yeah. This Olympics is funny. I think I can talk about it now because the Olympics is over, right? Is it still on?
I think the Olympics has just finished actually, yeah.
It’s just finished? Okay. I was working on the Coca Cola project. That’s not so much for the Olympics. It’s more that Coke is an Olympic sponsor, so they tacked that on for, I think, a majority of their campaigning this year. That ad was created also for internal use mainly, it was for their annual systems meet. Also the event was produced by Pivot Marketing, the same agency that handled Bad Love. Again, the creative director of Coke, too, he was very involved in a meaningful way. We came up with sort of opening. It’s actually an opening film for the event.
The team that was working on a segment for the Olympics opening ceremony with the creative director Fernando Meirelles’s Production Company O2, they were working on something for the Olympic ceremony that would contain segments for regions all over the world. They were in talks with me to shoot the section representing China until the project was cancelled because of all of the budget issues, as we all well know, leading up to the Olympics, all of the social infrastructure issues, all of the challenges. The project got cut. It was so unfortunate because-
It’s very interesting how the industry is changing. All of these different technologies are coming together to be able to find people all over the world to work on projects.
Yeah. It’s great because it’s more democratic. All these arbitrary barriers that we put up, all these structures, they all just get in the way. I don’t know how to put this delicately without offending a lot of people, but there’s a reason why there’s an anti-agency model that is working for a lot of pipelines out there, thriving. There is a reason for that. Especially in a rapidly changing environment like China where people respond so quickly to shifts in temperature, new technologies, new social phenomenas, new celebrities, everything, you need to be much more versatile. I feel like not even versatile, part of that is just being lean. You just need to cut down. One person is very versatile, and then two people may be versatile, but you have two people that you’re accountable for now. Just making everybody get on the treadmill, I think, is a good thing at the end of the day for just evolution of this form of visual language.
That’s very interesting, Gary. I think we should probably stop at that, but that ending of this lean way of operating is producing the sort of remarkable work that you do. Thank you so much for your time.
It’s probably because I’m thinking in the back of my head I have to run to the gym right now.
Absolutely. I don’t want to hold you up. I highly recommend you heading over to Gary Yong’s Movidiam profile. Check out his work. He’s done some incredible stuff with an incredibly diverse international background and this forming his worldview, which has created some remarkable projects based out of China.
Thank you so much for your kind words, George, and for this opportunity.
An absolute pleasure. We’re delighted to have you participating on Movidiam. If you haven’t heard any of the previous podcasts with Jonathan McCorkle, Simon Rowling, you can check them out on the blog or iTunes. See you next time, Gary.
