Chasing Light

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. To tell a story of people requires the right person to tell it, and that’s where Wellington Chen came in; the guy with the Leica, and Executive Director of the not-for-profit Chinatown Partnership, offered the all-access pass and extensive photo archive that made this multimedia documentary possible.

With Wellington as our compass and Sunday Afternoon as co-agency and AR partners, we bridged old and new Chinatown in subject and execution, documenting residents across age and profession through archival and new photographs. The film was broken into AR chapters that leapt off the pages of CANAL Magazine; with each turn of a page, a new video played the interviews, vignettes, and time lapses that make up the full film.

Chasing Light made the cover of the 2023 CANAL Mag, and the full documentary debuted on NOWNESS as part of their “Portrait of a Place” series. On Canal Street itself, we designed two highly visible placements, a banner on the red Chinatown information booth and a multi-poster campaign in a storefront’s windows, so passersby could step straight into the film.