If you've ever had the chance to visit the restaurant, you'd know that Mr. Wong is quite a character. If he's not preparing the noodles like in the video above, he's in the kitchen putting orders together himself, running food out to the tables or having loud conversations with customers that somehow look like family reunions from the outset.

When we first when in for a site visit, most of our correspondence so far had been through his son, Everson, and it was kind of made out that most of our communication to Mr Wong would be through Everson too, almost like a Chinese-Malaysian Uncle translator for us. Very fortunately for us and all our years in Singapore, this wasn't our first rodeo.

All it took was him knowing that we were from the little island to the South (of Malaysia) to hit it off. After a little bit of back and forth about what we do, he had decided he was in good hands and let Everson know that too. It felt like a little bit of weight off our shoulders, although we knew the interview portion of the video was going to be in Cantonese, it felt good knowing we could explain/ask him directly if we needed anything in particular on the day.

For the shoot, we had decided to rent out a set of vintage-modern lenses (modern lenses with vintage characteristics) to compliment the way that the noodle-making had been modernised, without losing sight of the original recipes/processes.

Vintage lenses are always a tricky choice, because while they introduce a lovely character to the image, they also open the door for a lot of imperfections that some clients aren't always fond of, and found this set of lenses to be a perfect balance of the two.

Due to the nature of the shoot being pretty maximalist, we opted for a very simple shot list and instead focused on getting really good coverage on the whole process.

Mr Wong's style of work is fairly chaotic and intense and didn't leave a whole lot of room for re-takes as all the products showed in the video were for consumption at the restaurant. We took turns between stabilised shots and handheld to make sure we had more than enough angles of all the processes to be able to stitch it all together in post.

A lot of the time during the interview section, we relied on Everson for quality control and prompting the questions. He did a great job being stubborn on getting the right takes and that helped us out a lot in the editing process. We transcribed the video then created a document that had the Cantonese and English subtitles side-by-side with timecodes, and used this to refine the content into a first draft.

When we were cutting it together, we were trying to figure out how to remove the off-screen light from falling and Mr Wong's reaction to it without it seeming awkward, to which we decided,

"why don't we just leave it in and make it more intentional?".

We really liked how it provided an extra layer of authenticity to both the video and Mr Wong, but, from our experience in Singapore, thought it wouldn't make it past the first round of revisions.

To our surprise and delight, Everson not only approved of the first draft but actually had zero changes to make except for some spelling/grammatical errors. We can only attribute something like this happening to having amazing clients, building lots of rapport pre-shoot and being open and honest about expectations.

Everson gave us a lot of freedom to approach this project in a way we seemed best fit and we're glad it payed off for him and for us.