Title "Love from Women's Kingdom"

I knew this popular Malaysian YouTuber, Sheron, from a colleague. She told me she did a cover. An old song from a mainland China TV series Journey to the West. It was nostalgic to me and so I immediately offered to make a music video for her.

One important thing I learned from Lyona was to select colours from colour wheel carefully. I imagined the colour palette to be mainly brown and red and so I purchased a brown backdrop and a red Han dynasty costume from Wish. It was hard to find a convincingly ancient looking place to film in this heavily urbanised Singapore and so I decided to film it at my home using a backdrop.

S-size for the costume because Sheron was petite. The costume took 5-6 months to be delivered from China to Singapore due to Covid.

I saw a model friend having a cool head mask of the monkey god and I bought it from him. Much work needed to be done as it looked too clean. I bought eyeballs and pointed elf ears from Wish and superglued them to the mask. I could not find anyone to act as the monkey god. Fortunately, Sheron knows martial arts and she was very kind to do it even though the mask was very uncomfortable to put on.

It was quite difficult to arrange the shooting days with Sheron because of her unpredictable work schedule as a nurse. But the delay gave me more time to prepare and make more lotus flowers. Throughout the Covid months, my friend Michael helped me fold lotus flowers from tracing paper.

I arranged two nights of shooting at my home. On the first night, we shot the playback. She had her make up done and costume put on at her home before she took a cab to my home. On the second night, we shot the action sequences of the monkey god. On both nights, Michael helped me to throw the red flower petals and release the fog from a new fog machine I bought from Wish (again).

For camera system, I used Sony a7iii and 50mm sigma art 1.4. I did not use a wider lens because the backdrop was not very large. For lights, I mainly used a ring light. The entire crew was just me as the director and camera man and Michael. I like to keep the crew small and lean.

Immediately after filming, I started editing. Like Lyona, I believe that if I delay, I would forget about the good takes. I placed the main playback that I shot on tripod on the timeline and sync. On top of the playback, I placed other shots such as the playback that I shot handheld and the action sequences of the monkey god.