CHASING LIGHT

2023

Some projects start with the answer, but this one started with questions. Why was a Manhattan neighborhood steeped in culture so misunderstood? How do you honor age-old traditions while celebrating new ones?

And most importantly — who’s that guy with the Leica taking a million photos of trash?

We set out to find common ground in Chinatown, New York with Chasing Light: a living portrait of business and culture, tradition and innovation, people and passion.

 

More than a place and or any one culture, we wanted to go below Canal Street’s surface by giving its residents the floor. But to tell a story of people requires the right person to tell it, and that’s where Wellington Chen came in — guy with a Leica and Executive Director of the not-for-profit Chinatown Partnership — who offered the all access pass and extensive photo archive to make this multimedia documentary possible.

With Wellington as our compass, and Sunday Afternoon as co-agency, creative partners and AR-leaders, we bridged old and new Chinatown in subject and execution: documenting residents across age and profession through archival and new photographs. With Sunday Afternoon as our partners and leading the charge, we were able to break the film into AR chapters that lept off the page of CANAL Magazine. We wove the collective story of the doc into a single large-format print magazine powered by AR. The modern medium revealed history in a new light through immersive stories that literally popped off the page.

“Chasing Light” made the cover of 2023 CANAL Mag – the portrait setting the tone for the Sunday Afternoon publication. The documentary was segmented into chapters spread across fourteen pages of the issue. With each turn of a page, a new video popped off the magazine to play the interviews, visual vignettes, and time lapses that make up the full film. The full documentary made its debut on NOWNESS as a part of their “Portrait of a Place” series.

The best place to advertise a film about what makes Chinatown special is what Chen himself describes as the “quintessential main street” – Canal. We designed and occupied two highly visible placements along Canal St: a large banner on the red Chinatown information booth, as well as a multi-poster campaign in the windows of a mid-renovation storefront.


Both placements created interactive opportunities for passersby to engage with the documentary and its AR capabilities, as well as appreciate the portraits and design.