This Young Director Has Shot Promo Videos for a Whole Roster of Young Stars | 100 People With Ideas

Peng Youlun's career may be proof of the old line: once you are lucky, twice you are good.

This is the third time Peng Youlun has shot the visual short films for Li Yuchun's Why Me concert. This time is a little different: Li Yuchun made her name in 2005 by winning Super Girl, Hunan TV's singing contest, and this year marks exactly ten years since her debut.

The idea for the films came out of one simple question — if Li Yuchun had not gone in for that contest ten years ago, what would she be now?

So Peng Youlun had her play a run of "cool jobs" — secret agent, astronaut, artist, hypnotist — five promotional films in all, one of them with a bare-back shot that pushed further than Li Yuchun had gone before. On the day, to strip away Li Yuchun's idol persona and answer her worries, Peng Youlun brought in an actor to walk the whole sequence in front of her first. Only then did the bare-back shot get made.

Peng Youlun's thinking about the films is blunt: "Cool is a given. Put a promo up online and if it isn't cool, nobody looks at you."

Take this round's astronaut and hypnotist films. A lonely planet under an endless universe, a fragile rose on a barren world, a hunted and unreadable hypnotist — any of it is enough to make Li Yuchun look cool. But Peng Youlun wanted the films to "carry a bit more warmth, a bit more play."

So in one of the finished films audiences saw online, an astronaut reaches a planet and gives his last breath to the last rose growing there. As Peng Youlun puts it, he's "the lonely Little Prince."

The hypnotist doesn't just sit facing a patient, either. "In twenty or thirty seconds, an ordinary hypnotist may not strike anyone as cool. But give her another identity — say she's being hunted in the Middle Ages, and say everyone takes her for a hypnotist when she's really a dark angel — then it gets interesting."

Peng Youlun compares working with performers to arm-wrestling.

From the planning stage on, the one shooting and the one being shot push their own ideas against each other to see who talks whom around. Li Yuchun, who has worked with her more than ten times, is no exception; the two of them still disagree often, Peng Youlun says.

"For a performer, the first question is always how I look. Above that, she knows the film exists to catch the audience's eye, so she gives up the narrative, the story parts. It isn't that she has nothing to tell. She chooses not to tell it." As Peng Youlun sees it, performers think first about a promo's visual punch: shoot it cool, shoot it exciting, and that's usually enough for them. The director's job is to get a story into it.

Peng Youlun joined Super Boy in 2007 to run visual production, and built close ties with Hunan TV and Tianyu Media. Before she started her own studio, she handled the visual side of Hunan TV's talent shows and New Year's Eve galas several times over. The records and music videos of the artists who first came out of Tianyu — Zhang Jie, Zeng Yike, Su Xing, Wei Chen, Hua Chenyu, Bai Jugang — were mostly hers as well, packaged by her.

Peng Youlun says she has been "pretty lucky": from the start she got to shoot performers who were "good, and had something particular about them." What she is good at is catching what sets a person apart and turning it into a picture. In Hua Chenyu she saw "a loneliness he carries around, and something Martian."

The work has kept her among these young people ever since. Later, pushed hard by performers who knew her, stars from outside the talent-show world — Nicholas Tse, Chen Kun — started asking her for films too. When variety shows took off, Hunan TV came back for promos: the three-minute film slotted in after Sun Nan pulled out of I Am a Singer 3 without warning, and the short films for each family in the latest season of Dad, Where Are We Going? 3, were all hers.

On the set of Dad, Where Are We Going? 3

In 2011, with everything at Hunan TV going her way, Peng Youlun left anyway and set up her own studio, Gravity Space. From 2007 she had spent three straight years on Super Boy and Super Girl, and the films had started to come out looking alike. Looking back, she describes Hunan TV's promos, half joking, as "Dong! Dong! Chua! Shua!" She had had enough of it, she says. It was time to meet people from other circles.

The new work gives her much more room. Lately she has been busy with an ad Luhan shot for the Daling app (Daling is a cross-border shopping site) in a heavily guichu style — guichu meaning something like Lei Jun's Are You OK? video, which uses strange, relentless repetition to brainwash the viewer. Luhan wears a dopey, playful look and hums the same near-meaningless lines over and over: "La la la la, Daling Daling, lu lu lu lu, Daling Daling, gogogo Daling Daling, buy buy buy Daling Daling…"

Peng Youlun calls the ad "completely insane" — a virus, really, loose on television and online.

The staff at her studio are a mixed lot. Among a team of more than 20 you can find former directors, designers, concept artists, a first-rate guitarist, a collector of mobile web novels, even someone who switched into editing out of nowhere. That mix is the studio's advantage: everyone brings a different angle, so what comes out is unusual, and "impossible to file under anything."

Impossible to file is exactly what Peng Youlun wants. Her next move is to turn the company into a film and television production company, so that whatever comes next — promos for television and the internet, or the feature films she wants to make later — there is always "something new" in it.

She has a "different" kind of inspirational comedy moving forward, already at the script stage. We asked her about various things people say inside the industry, and the answers were worth hearing.

"What do you make of the post-90s generation?" "They're a group that gets consumed."

Peng Youlun did the visual design for Bai Jugang's album Young Bai (《少年白》), and a lot of her thinking about the post-90s went into it. The album case was fluorescent green. Bai Jugang wore all black, his trousers pulled most of the way down, a white bar over the crucial part.

The cover had plenty of punch and plenty of cool, but it didn't match Bai Jugang's well-behaved image, and fans complained.

Peng Youlun felt hard done by. Fans hadn't grasped the design, she thought. The album also had graffiti, a lyric booklet and other pieces of design in it, but most fans wrote the whole thing off before they ever opened it.

On the day of the interview, she talked us through it.

"Pulling the trousers down is really saying one thing — so what. Abroad, a boy showing contempt might run some way off, drop his trousers and bend over with his back to you. Justin Bieber has done exactly that. We can't do it that way here, so we covered it with a bar."

The album also carried "banknotes" drawn over with anime characters — Luffy from One Piece, Doraemon, Conan. What Peng Youlun wanted to say was that money, which the older generation cares so much about, may not count for much in the eyes of the post-90s. Those cartoon figures stood for "anti-tradition, anti-authority." There was also a Mona Lisa plastered with labels, next to a post-90s kid plastered with labels. Both, Peng Youlun says, were about "refusing to be labelled."

"Plenty of businesses and media outlets are studying the post-90s right now, but they don't want to understand them. They want to consume them. The research may exist only to sell one piece of fried chicken, one can of soda. So before they notice it, the post-90s become something to be consumed."

"What do you make of reality shows?" "Everyone has to get a scene."

In the days before the interview, Peng Youlun had been watching Go Fighting! and Divas Hit the Road — homework, she said, for a reality show she was about to appear on, where she would coach contestants on how to shoot.

She used Go Fighting! as her example: the show works because it "gives everyone a scene, and cuts every one of those scenes into the show." First, the cast has to be spread out, so the cameras can be spaced out too, with different operators taking close-ups, mid-shots and the rest. If the performers bunch together, one person turns around and the shot is lost.

So long stretches of "fighting as a group" may be one reason Divas Hit the Road was less watchable, in her view. Viewers put the show's dullness down to the goddesses all holding themselves in and flattering one another — but she doesn't agree with that: "Their roles have no core word either. Every celebrity reality show has to dig out a star's personality and put it on screen. Every role on a show needs a core word and a short biography."

"What do you make of directing as a job?" "Any director needs the ability to get it done."

Calling a director a dream builder is no exaggeration; put more plainly, she's a storyteller. Which means a director takes fantasies and ideas and carries them out, until in the end there is a concrete thing with a body to it.

The problem she has to face most often is probably the gap between the ideal and what she actually gets.

Closing that gap comes down to preparing thoroughly beforehand, coordinating as much as possible during the shoot, and patching and reworking with everything you have afterwards. It is, in truth, a job that leans on getting things done.

"There's a gap every single time… For small directors of our generation (laughs), the budget and the schedule are genuinely hard. I'm not one of the big directors who can say a shot needs 126 takes — everyone would go mad… Every director has to know how to get it done."

Peng Youlun at work