Berkeley, California, United States of America
I take on mythical/fantastic/cultural travelling shoots both doc & narrative, I shoot film, video, other, location/studio recording, lighting, etc. I really want to work for National Geographic someday.
Here is a link to my resume.
I was born October 24th, 1979 under the sign of Scorpio in the year of the Goat. My mother wore pain on her heart from a succession of cold/hot men and a painted over childhood. She grew up in a relocated military 1950’s Bavarian-lined family in South San Francisco. Her father was the postmaster on a large navy ship outside Tokyo during WWII. My father grew up Chinese in Berkeley in the isolated company of reptiles with his outgoing brother and sister, his loving mother and his whiskey drinking father. Grandpa was a cook on the run for the US infantry in Germany during WWII.
I grew up amongst a small tribe of many-colored kids roaming the neighborhood on a housing project called Savo Island that was rumoured to be the site of where Jimi Hendrix spent the first couple years of his life. There were little Don’s, skinheads throwing condoms filled with piss, future pimps and bank robbers. There was an antique toy store owner who sold weed over the counter on the corner where we’d sit around and cap on each other. We were filled with sugar. I was white and Chinese. Sex was unheard of but touching was like an underground movement.
I shot my first photographs with a Japanese medium format camera my mother’s father had taken back from Japan along with a dead man’s katana. I was completely taken by the amount of texture and color you could spill onto a photo. The imperfections and chaotic elements of nature echo back to me like the awkward dissonance and refractions of ordinary people’s personalities.
I originally left for school to study marine biology at UC Santa Cruz because I didn’t want to be like the older kids in the neighborhood who left high school and stuck around their mother’s houses, lined their windows with vodka bottles and stole grandfather clocks from their neighbors. Six months into college I found the film program and ultimately chose my major. In film I found the opportunity to create a tent containing movement, color, storytelling and dreamtime. During the twilight I read the theoretical essays and at night I wrote my treatments and editing ideas. When I edit sometimes I’m calculated, and sometimes I tear my clips to pieces trying to recreate the collision of a burning nest of birds, a calm float on the lake or the plaid pain of a back injury. The more films I shoot the more organized I become and the more fun I have settling into the process and improvising my role on the set and in the editing room.
After I graduated school I became the motion picture rental supervisor at Adolph Gasser’s in San Francisco, owned and run by Adolph and his son John. Adolph engineered the camera and rig that filmed the atomic bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he was also good friends with Ansel Adams, and I learned practical video and photography equipment from him and his employees and also from maintaining the equipment myself for customers in the field. I got many freelance jobs through Gasser’s.
In February of 2005 I was hired to shoot a documentary in Dharamsala, India about His Holiness the 14th Dalai Llama and the Tibetan Gyuto monks. We spent two weeks living with the monks and filming the Dalai Llama. It was a once in a lifetime experience that submerged me into a culture that was completely the opposite of the one I grew up in. What communities held as important and what figures they respected (such as inaccesable Hollywood celebrities like Madonna vs. spiritual leaders like the Dalai Llama) was very defintive of the differences between western cultures of capitol and eastern cultures of spirituality and community. Being there cemented the idea in my heart that what I was doing was right, or at least in agreement with what my part in the universe was. I often felt out of place growing up, so to know that I was on the right track was a relief. The more I live the more I believe this, and the more interesting places I find myself.
I’m shooting a lot of documentaries presently, but in my career I would like to focus on directing/shooting narrative features that although on the surface are stories about people, underneath they are about movements of energy, planetary patterns, man’s history, mythologies and the overall order in nature’s chaos. I want to contribute my varied experience to the next generation of filmmakers as an artist and also to help change each individual’s perspective of the world.
My Mom is a social activist/office
manager who writes funny narrative political suggestions to thousands
of people around the world. My Dad is an Engineer currently residing
in Munich. I know I've got a destiny that effects all of mankind, but
that's up in the air right now. Whatever, "dude" is one of my favorite
words and I really like to eat.