I’m writing this newsletter from Incheon Airport in Seoul, Korea – stopping over for a few hours en route to mainland China.
Not a trip I thought I’d be taking anytime soon, but Hollyland was kind enough to invite me and some other creators you may recognize out for a week of fun and learning at their annual WeConnect event, in celebration of the company’s 7th birthday.
Having never been to Asia, I couldn’t resist.
Ok that’s as far as I got writing in the airport, the rest of this I’m writing from Los Angeles, after a whirlwind week that even included making a short film from scratch!
I learned a ton, made some friends, and came home so inspired by the talented creators in attendance.
Our itinerary was packed, and there’s way too much that happened to cover here, but I’ll hit some highlights and takeaways relevant to filmmaking.
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Traveling to mainland China
I was frankly a little scared flying in, imagining scenarios where I would get turned back home at customs, or bring in contraband accidentally and cause an international incident 😂
Fortunately, customs went totally smooth at Shenzhen airport, and I was next greeted by my Hollyland rep Flora holding this which put a big smile on my face:
Another YouTuber I knew, Antonio Wimmer, had also just landed from Spain, making it an even warmer greeting. A few years ago, he reached out and helped me get one of my first sponsors when my channel first blew up – what a mensch.
We ate the first of many HUGE Chinese family-style meals, checked into our rooms, and hit Huaqiangbei, their big electronics market, where we saw tons of knockoff products (including Hollyland lol), and I got my first taste of the futuristic, cyberpunk vibe of China’s big urban centers.
Meet & Greet
Finally I met all the other 29 creators and Hollyland staff in attendance at their HQ. There were some familiar faces from my NAB trip, and plenty of new ones from all around the world.
The diversity of not only cultures, but also areas of expertise, made it a really exciting group. Among us were travel filmmakers, narrative filmmakers, commercial filmmakers, educators, tech influencers, and everything in between.
One of our collective favorites was an 18 year old creator named Galang from Indonesia, a self-taught, unassuming prodigy who started with less than probably all of us and has already built a career for himself from scratch with a camera 🥲
We took a tour of the Hollyland factory while playing ice breaker games to get to know each other. The point of the event is connecting with other creators, and Hollyland did a great job facilitating that. Among the other Americans in attendance were Chris from YCImaging, and Landon from Fulltime Filmmaker.
We then broke into teams for our first challenge: live-stream shopping. In China, this is a MASSIVE business. Basically streamers run their own little Home Shopping Networks live on different platforms including Tiktok, and people tune in to watch and order through them, giving the streamer a cut of each sale. As an industry this has been growing very fast every year in China, and it won’t be long until this is big business in the US too I’m sure.
When there’s too many cooks
With projects like this, where you’re grouped with other filmmakers who you’ve never worked with before, and you have to determine your own roles, it can be really messy.
A lot of creators I spoke to felt the same way. Typically, there’s only going to be one director, so it’s hard to contribute without stepping on people’s toes when there’s no hierarchy.
For this project, there were way too many cooks in the kitchen, so I was happy to step back and observe. For me (and many creatives) I have to either be fully in control, or fully in the passenger seat – if I’m jockeying for input or my role is unclear then I go a little crazy.
For that reason, I was worried about our big project of the week – a short film we’d be making in our next city – Chongqing.
Filming in China’s “cyberpunk city”
We flew to Chongqing, and had some fun exploring this even more futuristic city (featuring a never-ending cityscape of skyscrapers, electric cars everywhere, bright colored lights, animations on buildings, robots, the craziest drone show I’ve ever seen, etc.)
Then it was time to break into groups again to make a film in this new city.
They split us into assigned groups of 3 creators, plus a Hollyland chaperone. I was glad my group was two people I already clicked with – Daniel from Peru, and Jeff from France. Here’s us practicing our Asian squats.
And our Hollyland rep Skylar was an absolute champ, helping us make everything happen and encouraging us to go big – even though she was just as sleep-deprived as us the whole week.
For this project, they gave us prompts for the video concept, gear options to choose from, and potential perks we could win (a private car for transportation, extra prop/wardrobe budget).
We won none, and decided to choose our prompt at random. We landed on “Cyber Chongqing” as the prompt – essentially, show off the futuristic vibe of the city.
Clash of Plans
Collaboration among three strangers is never painless.
Two of us liked an early idea, but I could see the third wasn’t into it.
So when he pitched something different to the 2 of us, we let go of our first concept, even though we really liked it, because we knew we’d need buy-in from all 3 of us to make anything worthwhile.
Good call: his idea ended up being stronger and got us all excited.
His idea was to split the project into three mini-films so each of us could direct in our own style. Then we’d figure out a way to link them together creatively.
This gave everyone ownership while still working collaboratively as one piece—a neat loophole to bypass clashing egos and styles. Now we could even lean into our clashing styles and it would make the film stronger!
We only had one night to write, pick up our gear & test it. Our camera menu was stuck in Chinese lol, but other than that, we were good to go.
We got a few precious hours of sleep—par for the trip, then a 5 a.m. call time for a sunrise opening shot from a tower in a park. We each acted in each other’s sections, and I was the actor of this opening section of the film, directed by Jeff.
Then Daniel directed Jeff as a frustrated loner looking for connection in the city.
The part I was directing was scheduled last, and we were running late. It was an indoor shoot at a place we weren’t really supposed to film in that day, and when we finally got there, we got kicked out of the location 😭
We tried to come up with a new concept for my section as quick as possible, but by this time I also started feeling sick and mentally fried.
Eventually I stopped trying to plan it all out in my head, and just grabbed the camera and speed-ran my whole segment with Daniel acting.
Some shots worked; others I wished I could have planned more, but we had only that day to shoot.
That said, it was a pleasure filming in Chongqing. Everything looked cool, either futuristic or old and textured. There was character and density in any frame you composed. And the people of China are so comfortable with filming in public that we basically got to do whatever we wanted, and even had some locals appear in the film.
Editing was also a sprint, we had to do it in-between our scheduled activities the next day, and by this time I had developed a nasty fever. So as I was turning into a sweating zombie, we worked right up to the deadline (literally, right before we were leaving to do the screening of the films).
We thought we had probably over-delivered on this project… then we saw the other films.
The competition was stacked—full of fresh styles and incredibly well-done work considering how insanely short the timeline was (and in a brand-new city, with brand-new teammates). The younger creators’ work was particularly inspiring and fresh to me.
In the coming weeks I’ll probably create a making-of video on YouTube and post the film itself there, even though I’m not all that proud of my section, and definitely wanted more time!
But as George Lucas says, ”It’s not a matter of how well you can make a movie, it’s how well you can make it under the circumstances.”
Huge thanks to Hollyland for hosting this crazy event and bringing creators together.
For now, I’m glad to be home, catching up on sleep, and back to work on the Oliver Brody short -editing, finishing the last BTS video, and hopefully applying a few lessons and tricks I picked up in China.
Favorites this week:
💬 Quote:
My ideas about writing changed as soon as I started directing. As a writer, I wanted my scripts to be perfect and fully formed. As a director, I know there are always factors beyond my control. Many things in any film cannot be planned concretely in advance. The best you can do is visualize what you want, and then respond to what’s there once you go on set. Nowadays I start from a fairly loose script and tend to write the dialogue on the day of shooting.
– Wong Kar-Wai
Let’s make some movies.
-Kent
PS – At the Seoul airport, a fan of the channel and his son recognized me. He runs a similarly named production company in Nepal and invited me to collaborate. Next trip??
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