Hi Creative Lab 5,
I’m Steven, a 25 y/o writer and filmmaker living in San Francisco, hoping to move in New York ;-)
My favorite colors are orange and blue. See —>
Memory Palace grapples with the idea of “home,” in the context of a long-distance, immigrant family. To fit such complex emotions into a 15-minute short, I had to get creative. Overhead drawings, screens, and quiet vérité moments were my bread and butter in this project.
The most important part of any production, IMO, is the story—the emotional core that ties it all together. I’m inspired by films that do a lot with a little, and, while I’m sure Google’s budget is nothing to scoff at, your commercials tend to be beautifully simple. Like, did I just shed a tear over a search query? Source: Parisian Love (2009).
With limited resources, I tried to imbue a similar simplicity in the making of Memory Palace.
Since Memory Palace, I’ve worked on film sets and made a few short films to capture feelings like summer, growing up, and corporate disillusionment. I directed, shot, and edited a commercial for my friend’s Mahjong club, which helped him sell out the event in one day and earn collaborations with reputable brands + venues across San Francisco. While Memory Palace is my most articulated whole of a film, each subsequent project captures improvements in a different elements of my craft, from pre to post-production.
Here’s the one for summer, which my friend affably dubbed “a trailer for Steven’s life.” It’s also vaguely about an unrequited crush (the making of this video helped me move on).
In this project, I tried new editing techniques and played around with slow-mo.
In my next chapter, I want to learn from the best and collaborate more. Having taken on many roles on my projects, I’d love the chance to work with a team like the Five.
Not only would it be a dream of mine, I think it would be a good fit, given Google’s historically novel and open-minded approach to their work. As someone who didn’t come from a traditional filmmaking background, I’m used to challenging the norm and finding creative ways to get an idea across, however abstract it may be. Plus, 99.9% allocation towards creating is my ideal split; I wrote about it in this 2023 journal-entry-turned-essay.
I went to a university known for its film school (USC), but I studied Public Relations, Computer Programming, and Consumer Behavior there. In my other life, I’m a technical writer at Salesforce, where I’ve learned a thing or two about tech, precise writing, and delivering at a high level for a large company. It’s a cool job but I can’t stop making films, so it would be even cooler to make a living as a filmmaker.
I customized this page for the application. To see my generic filmmaking website, you can click my name on the navbar or go here. Thanks for taking the time!
Here’s the last (super) short film I made, about corporate disillusionment. With a team of three, our goal was to do something fun with the cinematic spinny thing at my neighborhood playground. Shot on location under a fleeting golden hour. Conceptualized and edited by me in the same day. Could it be more polished? Yeah, I think so. Did we have fun? Absolutely.
Last year, I made Memory Palace, a documentary about the places that defined each era of my life: early adolescence in the suburbs, fresh independence in a big city, and my ancestral hometown in China.
It was my first “proper” short film—written, directed, shot, and edited by me; scored by my friend Bowen—and it’s been selected for festivals like LAAPFF (Oscar-qualifying for shorts!), San Francisco Documentary Festival, and the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific Film Festival.
This is a commercial short I made for SANDMARC, a company that designs action gear for travelers, photographers and filmmakers. The on-the-go montage primarily shows off their fisheye lens, made for iPhone and real-life action. [Click the image to make it move.]
Before I had a camera, I scrapped together videos like this—shot on iPhone—about personal fixations like my Penny skateboard and my process for breaking in Doc Martens. Together, my videos got millions of views across platforms and 10k+ followers. They taught me that you don’t need a big budget for your stories to resonate. I took a pause on content creation to focus on Memory Palace, and the rest is history.
