Today we’d like to introduce you to Joyce Yueyi Xing.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was a Neuroscience major at UCLA when I started to take courses in film, do internships in the film industry, and then decided to apply for film school in my senior year. I was very lucky that I got into my dream school – Columbia University for its MFA program in film creative producing. There, I got trained as a creative producer and took as many screenwriting courses as I could. My thesis year was cut off by the pandemic and I went back to China in March 2020. There I got the chance to produce some friends’ commercial shoots soon after productions resumed in China. That’s how I started to produce commercials, which I found isn’t so different from producing short films. Then when I came back to New York City in 2021, many Mandarin-speaking film and commercial producers had left. I got to fill in the gap as the pandemic continued to produce commercials for Chinese clients and various kinds of films with Mandarin content.
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 feel that I am quite lucky with my career so far. I got to keep working since film school, got some great projects with amazing people, and move forward step by step as an independent producer with recognizations from festivals and grants. Along the way, most projects I worked on have a very limited budget to work with. How to allocate funds and make the best use of these limited resources is always challenging, but I enjoy it as well. Knowing how hard the process is, I can enjoy more of the results and use my lessons for future projects. Rejection is also a common thing. In the film and the commercial world, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the work is bad. It’s good to learn the other party’s needs and wants through rejections.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a freelance independent producer now, working on various kinds of visual projects, from narrative features and short films, documentaries, fashion films, and visual arts projects, to commercials of different scales, with my production company Osmanthus Studios. I am specialized in creative producing, matching the best team that fits a project or a client’s need, to create original content. As a native mandarin speaker, I got many chances to work on productions that require a bilingual producer. Knowing how things run in both the U.S. and most Mandarin-speaking territories, I could be the bridge between the American cast and crew and the foreign team to better collaborate in different ways.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I always like to take on projects that are a little bit challenging for me. Just a little bit. For my role as a creative producer, there are often risks in the new things that we want to try as content creators. I believe that good visual works always bring out something new. If these new ideas come with risks that we have to face in production, then I’d like to evaluate it with my team and see how likely we are able to accomplish it. I like to take risks, but also want to ensure safety first. It is important for me that the team actually has the ability to take such risks and bring out a good result.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.osmanthusstudios.org
- Instagram: @osmanthus_studios
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joyce-yueyi-xing/
