Off the Grid with Yao Ming

It takes a village to tell a story (and sometimes an NBA Hall of Famer).

Embracing Chance

There is a golden rule in production that everyone knows. It goes something like: Never work with children or animals. The logic is sound enough. We respectfully disagree, however. In our view, if you remove or downplay spontaneity (a speciality of children and animals), you risk also downplaying what resonates with an audience.

We prefer the trouble.

When Marriott International partnered with the Yao Foundation to support education in rural pockets of China, they sought genuine transformation. To capture this process, we could not simply observe; we had to embrace the journey’s unpredictability.

Off the Grid

Our initial reconnaissance trip to the village near Chongqing was eye-opening. The infrastructure at the time was not in place; unpaved tracks made transport difficult, and GPS signals faded, forcing us to rely on local guides and instinct rather than the bedrock of all good planning: the call sheet.

This physical isolation was crucial to the narrative. It provided the baseline for measuring the efficacy of Marriott’s investment: focusing on a community on the edge of the modern grid and capturing the moment when that edge began to shift.

The moments that happen when you put the primary camera down.

The “Left-Behind” Dynamic

A generation of “left-behind children” defines the social landscape of rural China; students whose parents migrated to urban centres for work, leaving them in the care of grandparents.

In this environment, a film crew can easily feel intrusive. To counter this, we integrated. We put the cameras down and played. By adopting the roles of fun older brothers, we dismantled the barrier between subject and filmmaker.

Building Trust Off-Camera

We brought disposable cameras for the students and asked them to document their world, effectively levelling the playing field. We taught them how to frame shots and let them document us, flipping the power dynamic so they were not merely subjects under a lens. We developed the photos in Hong Kong and returned the physical prints to the children as gifts.

Fitting into the story, one small desk at a time.

The Return

When we returned to the site later, the project’s success was immediately visible. The gravel tracks had been upgraded to paved roads, and the classrooms were equipped with digital screens and modern teaching aids.

While the infrastructure improvements were the headline success in the client’s CSR report, the production success lay in the film’s invisible texture. The disposable photos never made the final cut—they were for the children, not the client—but the trust built during those off-camera moments flavoured every frame that did. Because we had dismantled the barrier between filmmaker and subject, the final piece did not feel like a corporate observation but more like a memory shared from the inside.