Today, we’d like to introduce you to Jeffrey Wu.
Hi Jeffrey, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
Of course! It’s been an amazing 15-year journey, so forgive me as I condense a bit.
As a kid, I was left home alone quite often. Latch-key kid is apparently the term nowadays. It was 2005, and I was in 5th grade. I spent most afternoons eating pop tarts, microwave meals, and watching fansubs of Naruto on the internet. This was also around the same time YouTube had become a thing.
YouTube is the reason I discovered filmmaking. The first thing I gravitated to were anime music videos (AMVs for short). Amateur editors were editing visuals by pairing bands like Linkin Park, Three Days Grace, or Evanescence with Bleach, One Piece, or Dragon Ball Z. I was immediately hooked as my bubbling teenage angst found its proper channel of expression.
As much as my parents would have wanted to push me into a more reliable career path, I’m sure they knew that I had found my “thing.” I spent almost all my free time making videos. I began to learn the ins and outs of Windows Movie Maker. I became active in video editing and AMV forums. Shoutout to CreativeCow. I joined online film festivals for AMVs. I collaborated with other editors online to make longer pieces called MEP or multi-editor projects. I even made it to the front page of YouTube myself with an AMV I did to Yellowcard’s song “Only.” That was the best day of my 13-year-old life.
After AMVs, I was obsessed with Asian-American YouTubers. In middle school, I made NigaHiga parodies. In high school, I made really bad action short films to be like Freddie Wong. My ultimate LIFE goal for the longest time was to be a YouTuber – whatever that meant in 2009-2013.
So, after I graduated high school, I started working with a local YouTuber called the Fung Brothers. It was my very first job. They made videos about food and culture in the San Gabriel Valley. I was 18 and searching for work on Craigslist, of all places when I found their ad. Their ad legitimately read, “Must be Asian, like Asian food, and own a camera.” I thought to myself no one else could fit this description better.
I was now in college and roped in my new friends. We formed an editing trio and started pumping out videos with The Fung Brothers. This was an exciting “bubble” time for YouTube. Our views and subscribers were climbing, and sponsors/advertisers were taking notice. Every day consisted of shooting and editing into the night, basketball at the local park, and freestyling to Wiz Khalifa instrumentals. I was basically living a very broke version of a “content creator house,” but I was happy.
In 2015, the college called to me, and I moved to New York to really study film. My classmates were incredibly talented and diverse. Everyone had unique tastes that weren’t mentioned by YouTube at all, and Spike Lee was someone you could bump into in the elevator. It was my anime tournament arc as I began to understand myself in the context of the entire industry.
It was here in New York that I got to edit for a rising mass media brand called 88Rising. For fans of the culture, their name needs no introduction. My job at the time was to edit and help write mini-docs on Asian subcultures. The history of Nujabes, Indonesian embalming techniques, and K-Pop history were just some of the topics I got to explore. It was like my “Devils Wear Prada” moment as a suburban kid who grew up just editing YouTube vlogs.
Eventually, the winters in New York proved too fearsome for my fragile California skin, so I moved back to Los Angeles. Inspired by NYC publications and my newfound interest in branding, I started my own mass media brand called POPEYE MEDIA. I had taken a liking to Japanese graphic design and found myself hopelessly fascinated with a magazine called POPEYE. Their eccentric layout and mixed media approach became a philosophy in which I approached video editing.
In its inception, POPEYE was an exercise in accountability. As a new graduate with no job prospects, I needed a schedule, and POPEYE became that. The goal was to make a video a week. During that time, we experimented with talk shows, travel guides, ethnographic mini-docs, and live performances, and the only thing that stuck was live performances. My close friends were musicians, and I loved music, so we decided to turn POPEYE into a music publication.
I’m going to condense the next five years of POPEYE’s existence into a paragraph, but we basically accomplished the goal of doing a video a week and experimenting with every type of music journalism-related content there was. Our connections in that space eventually helped us pivot into becoming a full-fledged production company. We’ve since worked with record labels like Atlantic and Warner Records and eventually came back full circle to direct something for Linkin Park – a story for another day.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
My parents warned me about entrepreneurship. They were business owners themselves and knew the hours, the heartache, and the black hole of money it takes to start a business yourself. The chances of me doing this successfully without the support of my parents are slim to none.
Something I navigated on my own was the concept of working with friends. I fell in love with filmmaking because it was inherently a social activity. Making art together and sharing it with people you love was as big of a motivation for me as the process itself. So, when I started taking POPEYE more seriously, it was difficult to reconcile with the fact that not everyone was as motivated as I was to chase a creative career. That’s not to say most of them didn’t lead a fulfilling career later on, but it did take time to find a community who shared a more similar path to me.
I failed in many, many different iterations of POPEYE. Before POPEYE, it was VQC. Before VQC, it was Victoria Films. This is just a short sample of the failed companies and groups I’ve formed in the past. Leading and understanding how to sustainably run a company has been a very difficult but ultimately rewarding experience.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Thank you for asking! I direct music videos and commercials under the name Mood Infinite (吴家晖), and I’m also the co-founder of my own production company called POPEYE MEDIA, where we provide holistic creative direction and film production for independent artists and creative brands.
You can find our website here:
https://www.popeyemedia.la/
And you can find me on Instagram here:
https://www.instagram.com/moodinfinite/
For the past two years, we have been working on our most ambitious project yet. It is finally out and has been released by Wong Fu Productions. It’s a surreal romantic drama that blends both narrative and music video elements.
You can check out my short “No Clouds In My Summer” here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_C7S7aGotU&t=25s
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I speak fluent Chinese and consider Beijing to be my second hometown! Catch me in the hutong alleyways with my yellow OFO bike-eating Chinese crullers.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.popeyemedia.la/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/popeyemedia.la/
Image Credits
VC Film Fest
