Late September

It's been a while since we've posted here. So, just a quick update...

This year has been taken up with preparations for a new documentary we will be shooting for the next 18 months or so on the run up to the Shanghai World Expo 2010. More on this later. For the moment, we are filming the occasional prep meeting, as the designs for one of the major pavilions are drawn up and slogan, logo and mascots are chosen.

With the Olympics almost over now, it feels a bit like someone has released a valve in China. A lot of work had been put on hold. But it's all starting to pick up again now, and LP Films has had a late September rush of projects just come in. We are working hard on films for the Golden Grand Prix chaps, who we put together the "Street Heroes" ad earlier this year. We also have a film coming up for a sub district of Shanghai that wants to expand its promotional activities.

More on all these projects over the next few weeks.

Live blogging of the Nat Geo broadcast

"The Making of the 2007 Special Olympics Opening Ceremony... next on the National Geographic Channel". The documentary plays for the first time on international TV in precisely 3 minutes.

A Farewell Song screening (the China "premiere")

A huge thanks to everyone who braved the rain and came along to the screening of A Farewell Song on Saturday (June 7th) at the Shanghai Cinema on Fuxing Lu. It was really great to be able to finally show the film in our hometown - and to see so many old and new friends there!

We had some fantastic feedback and made 3,500 yuan in dvd and soundtrack sales for the Chinese Red Cross and the survivors of the Sichuan earthquake. We're very grateful and I hope you enjoy them! If anyone still needs a copy of either the DVD or the soundtrack, please contact us.

If you know of anyone who might like to attend future screenings of our films, please pass on their email address and we will add them to our mailing list.

A Farewell Song screening (the China "premiere")

Photos from our screening of A Farewell Song on June 7th will be uploaded shortly.

National Geographic info

The listing for our Special Olympics documentary has finally gone up on the Nat Geo website. Please check it out for more info on screening dates and times.

http://www.ngcasia.com/watch/program_details.aspx?id_program=6325

Grand Prix ad in a taxi

Saw our Golden Grand Prix ad in a taxi today for the first time. It is due to roll out on TV screens in July.

Pangea Day screening

Just a quick note to say that our screening of "A Farewell Song" at the Pangea Day celebrations mentioned in the last post went really well. The venue was a run down old factory/warehouse space just south of the Inner Ring Road. Up on the second floor, one of the large rooms had been transformed into a screening hall with a reasonable projector beaming its load onto a massive hanging white sheet and an excellent sound system that made the most of Raymond Gress's fine work on the soundtrack.

Crowd was small initially but gradually increased, and by the end I am guessing there were about 60 people there. Kudos to the organizers (we met the lovely Panthea Lee during the evening and she was very sweet - the rest of them were buzzing around trying to keep the event going).

We will be announcing a big big screening in the next few days. Come back soon!

Screenings - UPDATED (6 MAY 08)

We have several screenings of A Farewell Song and the Special Olympics documentary coming up soon.

Details as follows:

A Farewell Song

Saturday, 6pm, May 10th, Shanghai

(3/F, 250 Chuanchang Lu near Zhongshan Nan Lu

We are the first screening of the night for the Pangea Day celebrations. More about the Shanghai screenings and Pangea Day here and here.

The Making of the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games Opening Ceremony

National Geographic Channel (across Asia, as follows)

DATE AND TIMES UPDATED

NGC Regional (SE Asia and the Middle East)

Sat 21-Jun-08   19:00   Sun 22-Jun-08  2:00   Sun 22-Jun-08 11:00

NGC Taiwan

Sat 21-Jun-08   19:00   Sun 22-Jun-08  2:00   Sun 22-Jun-08 6:00

NGC India

Fri 6-Jun-08      22:00 Mon 9-Jun-08   5:00 Mon 9-Jun-08 13:00

NGC Korea

Wed 25-Jun-08 20:00 Mon 30-Jun-08 7:00 Wed 2-Jul-08   7:00

NGC Japan

Fri 27-Jun-08    19:00 Fri 27-Jun-08    10:00   Mon 30-Jun-08 10:00

NGC Australia/NZ

Sun 29-Jun-08   22:30 Mon 30-Jun-08  9:00 Mon 30-Jun-08 16:30

NGC China

Tue 24-Jun-08  TBC

Shanghai Golden Grand Prix TVC launched

LT, Luther, Aaron and I headed down to the JW Marriott Hotel near People's Square yesterday for the launch of the Shanghai Golden Grand Prix ad. You can see the ad here. We'll be uploading it to YouTube too soon.

The vice-mayor, sports' bureau head, reps from the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) and from the Golden Grand Prix itself were there as were about 200 journalists from the print and broadcast media. We were invited up on stage to explain the concept behind the ad. You can see one of the articles that appeared today in the local press here.

Three years on... Question Time

Was checking out the newly unblocked news.bbc.co.uk the other day and came across the Question Time Shanghai Edition page.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/4338447.stm

It's hard to believe that the show was three years ago. It still seems very fresh. We were shooting a promo piece for the Howard Johnson hotel at the time when had a call from David Wivell, now a good friend, who wondered if we would be interested in helping coordinate the programme.

We met the BBC's rep on the programme (which is actually made by a company called Mentorn, based in Oxford) in Shanghai a few days later and a month or so after that we went behind the scenes for a live Question Time from Cambridge.

David Dimbleby was an gentleman, as kindly and wise backstage as he is stern and fair on air. And the rest of the QT team turned out to be very warm and welcoming. One of the highlights was the after show dinner at the Riverside Restaurant in Cambridge. LT and I sat next to David Coleman, the director, and had an absolute riot. The guests from the show (Armando Ianucci, John Redwood, Caroline Lucas, Lord Falconer and Anne Leslie) joined us and David D was a wonderful host, making the rounds with the wine to keep us all topped up.

But for all the good will and experience, it was hard to believe then that we would manage to bring a live political debate show to China. And even if we managed it, many people believed that we would be tied down with restrictions on what could be debated, and lumbered with a government-picked audience.

Months of negotiations and hard work followed on the China end (especially from David W), and eventually paid off. To the amazement of much of the Western press, we were promised a unrestricted show. There were no limits on the topics that could be discussed and the audience was to be hand picked by the QT team based on their usual requirement for balance of views and demographics (the only restriction on members being that they all had to speak English).

The process was not without its hiccups. Visas for the UK team were very slow to come through and it wasn't clear they would make it until about a week before the show. And then they did come through, so it was all fine.

The last blip was the issue of the audience. We (LT and I were listed as producers by this point) had invited applications from as many organizations as we had contacts with, as well as the general public. We received about 400 or so and called most of them to check their English and to see what sort of issues they wanted to talk about. And then, a couple of weeks before the show, we were contacted by the Shanghai foreign affairs office to see if we needed any help finding audience. We mentioned that we were weak on academics - people who might have knowledge about and informed opinions on social issues. They sent us a list of about 5o or so scholars and we vetted them the same way we had for the rest of the list, checking their English and making sure that there was a good spread of opinions.

A day or two before filming, the English press got wind of the story and started reporting that we had been forced to include government stooges in the audience. It blew over very quickly but it was a lesson in sensationalism. Out of a total audience of around 150, we had in fact taken something like 25 from the FOA list. It was a small number, and they had all been through the same process as the rest of the audience. The QT team was amused more than anything. In fact, they told us, it was quite common for them to get lists of potential audience members from local government offices in the UK.

The show on March 10 went well. Panelists included Chris Patten, David Tang, Isabel Hilton, government spokesman Liu Jianchao and WTO negotiator Long Yongtu. Questions were picked from suggestions made by the audience in the hour before the show (as they always are) and not checked by anyone outside the show production team. Topics included Taiwan, human rights, and democracy in Hong Kong. The panelists' debate was lively.  The audience proved to be subtle and open to debate too. Opinions differed wildly.

After they show, the production team and most of the panelists headed off for the ritual buffet dinner and drinks. There was a buzz in the air and everyone felt they had taken part in a remarkable event. It was the first of its kind in China and proved to us that despite the obvious restrictions a lot can be achieved here.

The web page I found today took me right back to March, 2005. If you have a moment, please read down the comments at the bottom of the page - reactions to the show. They are telling.

Jobsworth

We've been watching the hit counter on our website (www.LPfilms.net) shoot up over the last couple of weeks. The reason: we've been posting on several of China's most popular recruitment websites, looking for a couple of new staff.

The production assistant post is currently filled marvellously well by Yunnir. She has done a great job of translating our whole site into Chinese - we're hoping that will be online in the next week or so. But Yunnir was only ever temporary help. She is heading off to a job at a top consulting firm in May. And our assistant editor, Hui Hui, is also heading off this month.

Hui Hui has been an absolute stalwart. We took her on during the Special Olympics project, essentially to help us log and capture the 150 hours or so of footage we shot. She was quiet and reserved and we were so busy shooting we didn't have much chance to get to know her until we joined the editing process in October, once filming was over.

By that time, Hui Hui had become the master of our edit suite and the complicated filing system we had adopted for the footage. Without her, we would have been lost. She guided us through hours of tape and was often the only one who knew where to source a vaguely remembered clip of a child laughing or a crucial shot of stacks of bottled water (the latter we discovered was not, in fact, video footage, but a photograph).

So, over the months, Hui Hui has kept us at least partly sane, and helped on every section of the Special Olympics project (which entailed not only the feature documentary, but several short trailers for the event and stacks of video extras on the DVD), as well as the post production job on last year's Golden Grand Prix wrap-up video and the new "Lane Heroes" ad we will be launching at the end of the month. If there was a prize for the editor who has done most work in the field of sports videos over the last year, she ought to be a nominee. And now she is leaving to pursue her dream of becoming...

... a policewoman. Did I mention that she is not like most people?

So, we are spending today interviewing potential editors at Shanghai's newish Film Academy. We've interviewed a dozen or so of the almost 100 people who applied online for the production assistant job, the main qualifications for which are excellent language skills and an open flexible approach. But if you want to find an editor, the best way is to head somewhere where they actually make them. We'll be looking for someone with good technical skills and the ability to tell a story in pictures and sound.

And here's my plan B. If we don't find the right person at the Film Academy, we are going to head to the Police Academy. I am thinking we might just find a trainee copper who is thinking of making the switch to filmmaking.

"Lane Hero" post-production

Brace yourselves for industry-speak.

Post-production on the advertisement now known as "Lane Hero" has gone pretty well. The new edit station (Dual Quad Power Mac, Decklink card) is holding up, which is a bless'ed thing indeed. After telecining the original 16mm footage to HD at the Shanghai TV Tower, we imported it all full 10-bit into our system. There were some glitches. Over the first three days, the computer began to grumble until it effectively ground to a halt. We called the technicians in and realized that the mistake was our own. We'd been saving render files onto the raid (where they should be) AND the computer's own hard-drive. With around 180 megabites a second running through the system, we were forcing the poor little thing to effectively keep up two conversations at the same time and it was struggling to keep up. Anyway, we re-placed the render files, chucked Mac under the chin and he was rearing to go.

The rest of the process has been marvellously smooth. TVCs tend to edit themselves, at least in comparison to the slog of cutting a documentary. Our last project - the Special Olympics "making of" film - involved paring 150 hours of original footage down to a 48-minute TV show. With a TV ad, most of the shots match the storyboards exactly and it's mainly just a case of putting the best take down on the timeline and fine-tuning. That is, of course, an exaggeration. With only 30 seconds of screen time to play with, every frame becomes vitally important and the tweaking and teaseling of shots, transitions, music, live sound, and so on, become month-long obsessions.

We are almost done with the edit now. DVDs went off today for approval and we should be able to output the final digibetas within a couple of days. Once we have a final cut, we'll post it here and on our website. Do drop back in soon.

Gateshead screening photos

Some of the photos that Steve and Judith Jones took at the screening of "A Farewell Song" in The Sage Gateshead, last week. The film apparently went down well and we had a packed audience of, er, a handful. A hand full of two fingers. Erm, people. Two people, that is. Or at least that was roughly how many went to the screening at 2pm. There was another screening at 3.30pm, or so we hear. I am assuming everyone was saving themselves for the later showing. Please let me know if you were there.

Gateshead AFS screening confirmed

Just to follow on from the last posting... "A Farewell Song" is now confirmed as screening this Sunday (April 6th) at 2pm at The Sage Gateshead. Their website is at www.thesagegateshead.org and there is a link to the film event here. Please go along if you can make it. Let us know how it goes!

A Farewell Song screenings (UK)

Some of you may remember that our feature documentary "A Farewell Song" played at the Side Cinema in Newcastle at the end of February. Though we couldn't make it, the organisers have told us that everyone who saw it loved it. Well, our Tyneside adventures are set to continue. Afterwards we were contacted by the programming director of The Sage Gateshead who saw the film and thought it might work well at their upcoming Chinese musical event, the East'08 Festival. The screening is set for the afternoon of April 6 (a Sunday, I believe) at some time around 2pm. I'll post more details once I have them. I think it is a free screening, so do go along if you are in the neighbourhood.

For anyone interested in knowing more about "A Farewell Song", we have a page here on our website. There is a link on the page to the trailer too.

For info on The Sage Gateshead, click here. Follow the links to the Chinese festival.

Photos from the shoot prep

These are from a few days ago, mostly taken so we could work out angles on shots. More photos from the shoot itself will be uploaded in the next day or so.

The big lane shoot

Shooting on the athletics ad went really well on March 24/25. Our 100 extras did a great job of looking like 200 extras. And our main actors/athletes were Trojans, running up and down the lane all day for us. The weather held for both days too, which is remarkable and rather wonderful for this time of year, when drizzle is quite common. We had, in fact, consulted a fortune teller on the best day to film - and, would you believe it, we moved production back a couple of days to please the gods. If the blue sky was anything to go by, they were quite pleased. The only sign of damp came when we wetted the lane down to stop it looking too overexposed and contrasty in the bright sunlight.

We raced through the shooting script at a rate of knots and - credit to Luo Tong, producer, and Lu Yuqing, cinematographer, who worked out the timings - completely everything to schedule. There's a first for everything. If anything, shooting on 16mm speeded us up. On video formats, the temptation is to do endless retakes. But the cost of buying, developing and telecining film is a great incentive to get things right first time.

Next stop... telecine.

The big line decision

Thought I'd let you in on the exciting decision-making processes we use. Watch and be amazed as our team tests out the various techniques for creating a white line on a road.

The poster

The poster we had made for the athletics advert. Notice how it follows the contours of the bricks - we wanted it to look like a genuine pasted poster. It is in fact made of plastic.

One week to go...

Apologies for the radio silence over the last few days. We've been busy scrabbling together the final bits and pieces for our ad shoot, which is now set for next Monday/Tuesday (March 24, 25). If the gods are on our side, the weather will be marvellous, the extras compliant and the leads Marlon Brando to a man. We can only hope. We spent Monday and Tuesday this week finalising shots on the storyboards. Our cinematographer LYQ saw our shot lists last week and came back to us over the weekend with some more suggestions. We added several of these yesterday before going back to the lane with our Artistic Director to map out props and set.

The main issue in the lane is hiding the ugly aircon units that bespoil most of the beautiful brick walls. Since we can't really box them up without making them look even worse, we are going to have to cover them with carefully-placed clothes lines.

We are back to the lane on Thursday to finalise the look. Apart from the aircon units, the other two things we'll also be checking are the posters we are having made and the running track lines. The big question for the next day or so is whether we are going with chalk lines or white masking tape. My, what important decisions we have to make.

Stereotypes

Yesterday afternoon we had another casting session for the upcoming TV ad. We have now chosen the old man, fat man, thin man, teenage girl, 6-year-old boy, dwarf race starter, and the boy's father (a Tony Leung lookalike). We are still looking for a mother. The trick is finding cast who look enough like the obvious stereotypes but add a twist. Chinese is full of actors who play to type extremely well. Turn on the TV and you see them everywhere, in TV series, commercials, on chat shows. The twist is the tricky bit. And I've found that you can only follow your gut on this.

Update: we lost our fat man, but almost immediately found another one... a 350 pound professional shot-putter. This provides the ultimate twist. Our proverbial man mountain will probably be the fittest athlete in the race we are staging, in which he is meant to lose. For his "audition", he got him to sprint 100 metres in the garden below our office. He was very fast. Not quite up to my sub-14 second standard, but good nonetheless.

LostPensivos on YouTube

Just a quick note to say that most of our trailers and short videos are now up on YouTube as well as our website. This may be the solution for anyone who can't view videos on our site. You can see our YouTube profile and all the videos by going to www.LPfilms.net and clicking on the YouTube link on the homepage. You can also go directly to www.youtube.com/lostpensivosfilms.

I thank you.

Shanghai lanes

We've been trawling Shanghai lanes for the past week or so, looking for the perfect spot to shoot the upcoming TV commercial. It's been fascinating. "Longtang", as they are called in Chinese, are as distinctive a symbol of Shanghai as the hutong communities are of Beijing. And they are beautiful: criss-crossed labyrinths of brick terraces packed with detail in every nook and cranny. Sadly, they did not have a good time of the latter part of the twentieth century and they have become overcrowded and badly maintained.

We have looked at dozens over the past few days and some are in terrible disrepair. The exteriors are bad enough: potholed roads, leaky drains, peeling paint-work and so on. But, once you get inside, you see the true damage of decades of poverty and overcrowding. Crumbling walls, rotting door frames, mouldy wallpaper, corridors jam-packed with dusty ramshackle furniture.

Beneath all that though you can still see the potential of these long-suffering buildings. With an injection of cash, most of these places would not just be livable, but highly desirable residences. They remind me of mews houses in parts of London. If you ask them, many of the people who live in the lanes love their houses, even if they are frustrated about the cramped conditions and air of decay around them. There ought to be government grants available to help people do them up. In twenty years time, it will be the longtangs that people will visit Shanghai for as much as the high-rises.

But the sad fact is that the lanes are disappearing fast. Dozens have gone already, replaced with ugly office blocks. In one area we were walking round last week, half the houses were in huge rubble piles. We asked a friendly-looking man in a wheelchair what was happening to the remaining houses, many of which had strong art deco features, thinking that they might be spruced up and sold on to rich Chinese and foreigners as has happened to a few of the old longtang communities (I'd rather see them preserved for the original residents, but at least some of them are saved this way). But no, he said, they were all due for demolition. What will be built here, we asked. An office block, he said with a grim smile.

For a city obsessed with money, knocking these places down makes little sense, even financially, except in the shortest of short-terms. Over the next few decades, if these places are restored and well-maintained, they will become some of the most sought-after properties in Asia. Think about it: little bachelor pads in the heart of the fastest-growing economy in the world. Inside, some of them are big enough for families too, with their wandering corridors and little backyards. But knock them down and they are gone forever and all you have left is shiny office blocks, many of them  struggling for tenants. 

I'm not suggesting we keep them all - a change, after all, is as good as a wash. But, for goodness sake, let's not rush to get rid of them all.

We've chosen our lane for the TV ad, by the way. See if you can guess which one it is. Amazingly, we found a room in one of the houses for an interior scene we need to shoot too. That was unexpected. We all thought we would have to film the scene in a studio and patch it into the story. But, no, we found a large dining room on the ground floor of the second house we looked at. To one end of the room, big French windows lead out onto a messy old patio and then out into the lane through the big double "shikumen" doors. We told the owner we particularly liked the walls, which seemed to feature original old wallpaper, faded but still visible - making it a better fit for us than the rooms upstairs where all the old features had been replaced. Yes, he said, it does look old. The last film crew in here had it repapered and then aged.

On the way out, I half-joked with our production assistant that if any of the flats were free, I'd love to live here. You can't, she said. There is a demolition order on the whole area. It'll all be gone with the next five years.

The Score

More on Shanghai lanes later. For the moment, had to share this with you. We are trying to secure rights to a piece of music - a version of the jazz classic "Fly Me To The Moon" - for the sports ad we are working on. One of the big record companies owns the rights (publishing and recording) and has got back to us with a price of US$30,000 (£15,000) for one year of TV play. That puts it out of our range - so we'll have to negotiate. The irony is that, apart from the big ad companies who do everything by the book here, China is rampant with advertising music that hasn't been cleared. Very few royalty payments are ever made and even major bands have their music ripped off and played on prime time TV ad slots without ever making a penny from it. This is a road we've been down before. We've even had sound studios here try to sell us music licenses that don't belong to them. So... actually contacting the record companies and trying to pay your bit puts you at a distinct disadvantage. But that's what you have to do. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but also because intellectual property is starting to become an issue that the government takes seriously here and I wouldn't want us being scapegoats. Now, that would be ironic, given that we are doing a lot more than most here to pay for what we use.

Cast and crew

This afternoon has been all about crewing up for our latest shoot - a TV commercial we'll be filming in mid-March. So far, we have cameras and camera-men semi covered. We still need an art director, grips, sound and a proper casting director. This is one of those times when we can't skimp on casting expenses - we are planning around 120 extras. And all this for a 30 second tv spot.

Next up... locations. We are scavenging around for a great lane in the middle of Shanghai. More anon...

Mystery solved?

Of course, having put all our eggs in the MP4 basket for the new video setup on our website, www.LPfilms.net, we're now discovering that 90% of the world's population are having problems seeing them. The eggs. Er, videos. Anyway, if you can't see the eggs (or should that be basket?), we think we have found the solution.

It's like this. Macs ship with Quicktime, which reads MP4s. PCs don't, so can't. 

Answer: install Quicktime on your PC. It's easy. Go to www.apple.com/quicktime. Follow the links. It takes about 5 minutes.

Alternatively, buy a Mac. You know it's worth it.

Website relaunched

After about 2 weeks of inhouse design, much furrowing of brow and sweating of palm we launched the new-look www.LPfilms.net last night. With about 20 mbs of video content (way more than we used to have) we expected it to take an age to upload to the servers in the UK, but it ended up being a surprisingly nippy three hours. We've spent the morning checking links (only a couple of minor errors in evidence) and watching the videos through - and they are also amazingly quick - from this part of the world anyway.

Back in the day (up till yesterday actually), we used to assume that all our online videos had to be in QT and WMV format to make then readable on the vast majority of Macs and PCs. This time round we wanted videos to start automatically on opening their pages, so we've plumped for what we are hoping is the now-universal mp4 format. Let's hope it works. Please let us know - wherever you are in the world - if our adventurous spirit has paid off. Can you see all the videos and do they play through relatively quickly? If you have to wait to give yourself a little streaming slack, how long for? And what do you think of the other changes?

My impression from the China end is that things are relatively smooth. If true, this is a good sign and bodes well for keeping our site based in England. We've been thinking about switching to Hong Kong for a while - it has the advantage of speed to both China and the rest of the world. One day we would love to have a server based on the Mainland too but there are obvious reasons why this won't be for a while.

CNY

Lazy days over Chinese New Year. We'll be back working on the updated showreel (actually showreels plural) in the next day or so. Should be launching that and the new website within the week. Stay posted.

Sexy Kitchen weekend numbers

Well, 48 hours after uploading Sexy Kitchen to half a dozen Chinese video sites, we have had around 2,000 hits. No bad - better than we expected. We'll give it a couple more days to tot up the numbers, but at this rate, it is going to be an easier sell to sponsors. Crossed fingers.

Just in case the link I posted in the previous message doesn't work, here's another one (one URL for each episode):

http://www.tvix.cn/play.php?v=FxTysVDyYoL&c=myv http://www.tvix.cn/play.php?v=EKl55yiuYTp

http://www.tvix.cn/play.php?v=4E3h9BpGcRn

http://www.tvix.cn/play.php?v=vsxl4jDyZbN

Sexy Kitchen links

The cooking show (in 4 mini "webisodes") is now online at the following URLs (several other sites have picked it up too): http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_cb00XMTc2NjU0MDQ=.html http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_cb00XMTc2NjY1ODg=.html http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_cb00XMTc2Njc2NTI=.html http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_cb00XMTc2Njg1OTY=.html 

If you get a chance to have a look, let us know what you think. The show is in Chinese with English subtitles.

Sexy Kitchen (性感厨房)

Well, here goes, first post. LostPensivos Films is kicking off new projects in 2008 with the online launch of Sexy Kitchen (性感厨房), our new cooking show. We are still looking for a sponsor to back us taking the show to a television channel in China. We'll be starting a Sexy Kitchen website soon enough too - will keep you posted on that. But for the moment, we will just be on Chinese video-sharing websites, with the 23 minute pilot episode split into 4 "webisodes". Once I have the links available, I'll post them here and anyone who's interested can check them out and send feedback. Once I've worked out how to do it, I'll put the videos here too.

In the meantime, just to explain, Sexy Kitchen is a new type of show for China. Traditionally, cooking/food shows here have featured sombre chefs following strict recipes occasionally accompanied by a rictus-grinned presenter who knows nothing about food. The concept of chef-as-rock-star has really not yet arrived - though it soon will once we unleash Anthony Zhao on the world. He is a very hip, former chef at Laris (one of Shanghai's top Western restaurants) who now consults for would-be restaurant entrepreneurs, helping them to design their menus (the food bits) and set up their kitchens, and in his spare time rock climbs and rides his motorbike around the city. He is one cool cucumber. You'll have to check out the videos to see what I mean.

We shot the pilot over 2 long days, half of which time was spent racing round Shanghai buying food and filming AZ climbing at the Shanghai Stadium with his friend. The other half was spent in the kitchen - and here's the thing about the kitchen. It was the real deal, not a studio, so we were able to light it much more naturally than you would a sound stage or a TV set. Controlling the natural light was an issue, and it meant we had to blue gel our tungstens to stop everything looking too yellow. But the results look great. High-end, fly-on-the-wall, if such a thing is possible. You can almost smell the food. Honest.