Other work

Spontaneous ideas and projects

How do you get young people excited about saving their money?

By creating a financial institution that helps them save money while saving the planet.

Trophy Tour Mural

AFF Mitsubishi Electric Cup

Mural

This mural was an opportunity for me to pay tribute to Singapore before I returned to New York. If there’s anything I learned about Singapore in over a decade of living there, it’s that Singaporeans love football. The Singapore national team, more affectionately referred to as the “Lions”, have a storied record in Southeast Asian tournaments. They’ve won four AFF Cups (Southeast Asia’s most prolific football tournament), the second-most that any country in the region has won. So, what I wanted to do was hype Lions fans by alluding to the possibility of winning a fifth trophy this coming tournament.

Vanda

After missing out on seeing Yo-Yo Ma and the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the same week, I decided that I’d make an app that’d keep me better informed on arts events in Singapore. What started as a simple events calendar turned into an online publication that aimed to promote the arts in a city too busy for anything but work. I prototyped the app, and with the help of my school’s open house event, I was able to conduct user testing with a few hundred potential users from the general public.

The app actually attracted a few investors who funded the aforementioned user testing experience (I spent the budget on a neon light display. I was sure it would attract visitors – and it definitely did). My team and I even went so far as to pitch it to major art institutions in the city, who expressed great interest. However, I shut down the project at the end of 2019 to focus more on advertising work. To this day, though, this project serves me as a reminder to always have a bit of entrepreneurial spirit, and a bit more fire in your belly to stomach all the work that it takes to make your ideas come to life.

Stop Human Trafficking

I’m particularly proud of this series of TVCs, despite it only being a class assignment. We were required to make just one ad, however the team I led expressed great interest in the initial storyboards I submitted and gave their full effort in making the ads come to life. I’m especially grateful to them for obliging to my unreasonable request of shooting the ads strictly on location instead of a set (I was new to making ads, and I wanted every part of the process to be overkill).

STAND4JUSTICE

Looking back, it may not have been the smartest decision to film a human trafficking ad on location since we were pretty much limited to operating within the red-light district. In fact, the night we shot the sex-worker scene, we were kicked out of not one, but two sketchy love motels and left outside to soak in what turned out to be the heaviest rainstorm of that year. Luckily, we captured all the footage we needed and were able to continue the shoot once the rainstorm subsided. The kidnapping scene was shot next. We thought it would be fun riding around in a van wearing ski masks, pretending to kidnap someone, but the undercover police on patrol didn’t seem to think so (apparently, a camera set up on a tripod doesn’t relieve any suspicion). Fortunately for us, our student ID’s and laptops full of footage from prior takes made quick work of any explanations. In the end, we managed to complete filming in one night, and also protect all the equipment from the rain.

The process of securing the logistics for the construction scene was honestly more fun than filming it. Getting a location to film at was becoming difficult, with company after company turning us down. Finally, after hearing enough of “No”, I got up from my desk at school and walked over to the nearest construction site. There, I met the safety officer, who referred me to his project manager, who then referred me to his supervisor, who, after much pleading, graciously allowed my team to use the site’s perimeter as our set. Our celebration was short lived, however; “We still don’t have an actor for the scene” my teammate chimed. Determined not to let the momentum of my spontaneity go to waste, I walked into a restaurant across the street and sounded off: “I need one actor for an ad! Who here is good at acting?”. Immediately and (much to our humor) simultaneously, all the staff and patrons pointed toward a man in the far corner, having tea by himself. “That man love acting”, “He love being actor” and a number of other encouragements were hollered across the room. After a bit of teasing from his mates, the man consented to our request, smiling as the room cheered him on.

The three TVCs went onto win best ads of the semester (big whoop, I know). I think what makes me so happy about this particular project is that it encapsulates everything I love about advertising. Coming up with ideas, working together in a team, meeting new people, spontaneous excursions, and winning prizes for creativity. They all culminate in this sense of satisfaction you can’t seem to get with any other type of work. Ever since this project, I’ve tried to attack every brief whether big or small with the same drive, whether I’m writing the script, or looking for Hollywood’s next big thing to act it out.

Collectibles

Collectibles is honestly one of my least favorite projects in terms of creativity, but I do appreciate it for a few reasons. The main being that the entire preliminary submission was done in less than two days. I didn’t originally intend on sending in any proposals for my graduation show theme, but my boys* were really unhappy with the submissions that they saw. With just two days left till the deadline, I rallied them, and we got right to work.

I figured, if our graduation show was going to have anyone in charge of the branding, it should be us. In just a couple of hours, we managed to book a studio and gather a student from every course to join us for a photoshoot. It was a nice get-together of sorts, given that students from different courses didn’t really mingle in our school. Just imagine artists of all sorts of backgrounds, from dancers to painters to musicians gathered in a studio just having a good time interacting with each other.

The months leading up to the final product(s) did turn out to be a complete drag, but I’ll always remember this project for that flash of camaraderie the day we worked on that proposal.

The branding for the graduation show was extensive, and had to be so, COVID-19 spread around the world shortly after we won the votes of our schoolmates and were chosen by the academy board to work on the branding. This meant that we needed to produce extra material for the online events that would make up for the lack of a physical graduation show. Everything from social media posts, to augmented reality filters, and even zoom backgrounds were made to make the show as happening and put-together as possible. It’s only a shame we couldn’t get the figures produced and distributed as gifts to the graduating cohort; all the factories in the region were closed because of the pandemic.

Our original concept (the one we submitted for voting) was much simpler and direct. The purpose, after all, was to let the students shine and allow them to add their personal touches to their own action figure photos. My team and I had no regrets pivoting from the original concept (we didn’t have much of a choice anyway, we were instructed to develop representative characters instead of using the actual students).

Here, you can have a look into the entire original set, which my team and I had a very fun time creating.