When people ask me what I do for a living, what is my vocation, I always tell them that I am a storyteller first, and then a filmmaker. As a young immigrant who was born in the early 90s in China, I came from a world that is very different from today’s North-America.

Unlike other Chinese Canadian immigrants. My immigration journey was more than a flight from China to Vancouver. My father is a pastor, and we moved many times. I lived with the middle-class Americans of Los Angeles, the ghetto kids of Houston slums, the cowboys of Dallas, the fishermen of Newfoundland, warm-hearted Ontario farmers. And finally, here in this diverse multicultural city of Vancouver.

Naturally, my work is heavily influenced by my travels and experiences as a young Chinese kid in these strange and wondrous lands far away from home. Seeing, listening, smelling and experiencing things very few Chinese kids of my generation had ever even heard about. So, I try to utilise my unique life experience to bring forward moving stories that will touch viewers hearts and minds in a way that they relate to. They can see their story through my camera on the screen, or they might see their face in a story they had never imagined before.

As an Asian filmmaker who’s in his early career as a director and cinematographer, I want to focus on works which can bring Asian and other minority races of North American culture to the forefront of the silver screen. I love big films and I love large-scale images, but I’m also passionate about telling intimate stories that are authentic and engaging on this scale. Not just for some political agendas or messages, but solid stories which can make impacts on viewers through the use of established genres and innovating them.

After working for six years in the film industry, I have met so many Asians and other minority raced crew members and talents. We are still severely underrepresented, and I think it is time for me to do my part. I hope that one day no long in the future, my people and those other minorities can have a bigger stage to tell the stories that they want to bring to us.

For this short film, the goal at its most basic level is to tell an engaging story that uses the sci-fi genre in a humorous yet serious manner. A story of two people who meet in a very difficult time in human history for the first time. What do they do? How do they see each other and the world around them? By backgrounding the environmental and social devastation in the story with the comedy genre, we’ll see how regular people like me and my generation might behave in such circumstances in a humorous way.

I want to help to push the representation of more Asian and other minority race filmmakers. As an Asian immigrant myself, I realise the representation of Asian filmmakers in the western film world is severely lacking no matter if it’s in front or behind the camera. I would like to involve as many team members from different cultures around the world as I can because after all, Hollywood films are not the only ones worth telling.

The film will be shot with 8K cinema cameras with the current industry standard, edited and finished digitally. The film was made with heavy computer compositing by my friend and colleague Razor Tan to achieve the futuristic look of the space station and the post-apocalyptic world. I am heavily influenced by science fiction books like the ‘Three Body Problem’ by Liu Cixin and its fantastic imaginative depictions.

We are the real independent scene in Vancouver. This is our reality and culture here on the West Coast.