Today we’d like to introduce you to Shiyuan Zhang.
Hi Shiyuan, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
Hi! This is Shiyuan Zhang. I graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York last year with a major in film and a concentration in screenwriting. I’m currently freelancing in film development and packaging, creating stories for various platforms. Although my career path took a few unexpected turns, I discovered my passion for writing during college. Initially, I aspired to become a professional gaffer when I first enrolled in school. During my freshman year, I was the gaffer for every production class. As part of the class requirements, each student was expected to shoot their scripts in a studio setting. One of my biggest challenges was presenting various scripts with distinct styles using different lighting techniques within a fixed studio scene. Despite the difficulties, I found the process enjoyable and rewarding. It allowed me to convey my understanding of the story and the director’s vision through the use of light, almost like communicating in a silent language. At that time, I discovered my commitment to storytelling and my desire to tell stories. It just so happened that I was doing well in my screenwriting class, and my instructor suggested it as my concentration, so I chose screenwriting. (You never know …… My sophomore year was more of an experimental type of phase, where I was trying out various jobs on the production set, where I was mostly working as a gaffer or assistant director, and conceptualizing various stories, but hadn’t yet discovered any writing style of my own. In the end, because of COVID-19, I also needed more time to figure out what I wanted to do, so I decided to take a year off from school. I returned to my hometown of Beijing and attended a French school for a year to learn the language. It was a big lifestyle change for me, and I met a lot of people of all ages and professions there that I wouldn’t have been able to meet in college before. Even though I was doing something that had absolutely nothing to do with filmmaking and creativity that year, was actually an important turning point for me to explore my own voice.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I think uncertainty is a struggle for me. Unlike many people around me who have clear career goals, I’ve actually always been in a confused stage to explore. You can see through my experience that I’m constantly trying new things. Sometimes I wonder if that’s good or bad. It always feels like I don’t have a clear direction right now that I’m fully committed to. But I think it’s okay. After all, filmmaking is just a very small part of my life; every step has been counted as a life experience. Maybe I will be a video game streamer someday; you never know… Also, for a long time after finishing the film “Tulpa,” I always felt like I couldn’t get my writing to a state that I was happy with. This insecurity feeling stayed with me for a long time. But one of my favorite quotes is, “Life has seasons. You can’t always be in a season of harvest. ” So, I guess I need to give myself more time to grow.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I was offered the opportunity to work with a Taiwanese director, Chun-Chieh Wang on his graduation thesis, “Tulpa” when I was 21. I wrote the screenplay and did the concept planning and marketing for this film. Tulpa received the best script and other awards at several film festivals, including two screenings at the Museum of the Moving Images in New York and one at the Linwood Dunn Theatre in Los Angeles. It’s an unforgettable journey to create this short film. The non-linear narrative style tells the story of a high school student who conjures an imaginary companion that interferes with his sexual awareness by blending his spiritual realm and reality. It explores Buddhism, youth development, and spiritual sustenance themes by merging my cultural background with the contemporary social context. The director is a detailed-matter person. I also researched the accents of the actors’ native dialects and rewrote lines for each character. For this project, I researched various filmmakers who have deeply explored these themes in their works. I gained valuable insights by studying Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s scripts and reading Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s book on the making of “Memoria” (2021) to understand their development of multinational films and how they incorporate Eastern life philosophy into their cinematic languages. Then, I wrote a novella for my BFA thesis. The two main protagonists are multilingual speakers who undergo self-exile abroad, seeking to retrieve lost memories. The story analyzes an uneasy, ultra-modern social world in crisis, a fragmented and information-overloaded place where intimate relationships have lost their strength and meaning. This was inspired by my experience of frequently moving as a child, living in various language-speaking regions. This project offers me a chance to explore the potential meaning of my identity as a hybrid of both Eastern and Western cultures. I am in the pre-production stage of adapting my thesis into a short film, and I focus more on portraying the characters in a multilingual and geopolitical context to show their struggles in life. Besides, the Literary Magazine of the School of Visual Arts published two of my short stories after I graduated. They all discuss people who are lost in a foreign land and have a sense of rootlessness without belonging anywhere. Not only do these practical attempts shape my writing style, but they also confirm my interest in transnational and cultural identities in moving images. My aim is to continue to create stories with subtle yet powerful emotions that transcend cultural boundaries. Alongside my writing practice, I decided to take on new knowledge and challenges by enhancing my technical skills and familiarizing myself with filmmaking procedures to improve my writing. After graduation, I moved to Los Angeles, where I got a lot of training in cinematography. I worked at a rental house learning about rigging various cameras, and then on the weekends, I would follow my cinematography friends to go to sets and work as a camera assistant or a camera operator. This experience gave me valuable comprehension of the camera’s movement and its feasibility in approaching writing from different perspectives. I’ve also learned that writing a screenplay is not just about plot development and character relationships; it should be a clear instruction manual for filmmaking, a foundation for all the practice. It also made me love the city of LA.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc.?
I couldn’t be more grateful to the Filmmakers Academy platform. Many times, the night before going to the production set, I watched the lessons to avoid making mistakes due to a lack of familiarity with the equipment. In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan is also an important book for me, as if it were like a beacon for my writing. It changed my understanding of the form of literature and broke down a conventional and inherent framework for me. I also enjoy reading the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights over and over again when I’m in a bad mood, as well as some of Haruki Murakami’s short stories collections, which I feel have had a profound effect on me and sparked my imagination.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shiyuan_89/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shiyuan-zhang-82454a1a8/
Image Credits
Vinh Pham
Chun-Chieh Wang
Molin Liu
