Filmmaker, director, and California native Sean Wang has come totally full-circle. As a kid, he pored over films and commercials with heart — from skate videos to Google ads to shorts discovered right here on Vimeo.
“One of the Vimeo creators who inspired me since I was 13 is Colin Kennedy,” Sean told us earlier this year during a visit to HQ. “Growing up, this documentary piece he did about a kid from Michigan was a huge inspiration for me. It’s so emotional and engaging. There’s no production value, which is not a knock on the piece at all. It’s just simple — it’s like, Okay, tell your story.When I watched it, I was like, Why am I crying?
Today, Sean is creating films that make us ask ourselves the same question. Take for example his 2017 Best of the Year winner, “3,000 Miles,” which is an emotional portrait of his first year in New York, or “1990–,” which stitches together home videos to capture the beauty and impermanence of being human.
Read on for excerpts from our interview with Sean; be sure to check out his Creator Spotlight video above.
How did you get into filmmaking?
I was probably 12 years old, making little skate videos with my friends, and then I watched “Fully Flared,” which was directed by Spike Jonze. I didn’t know that much about film or directors at the time, but the intro felt like a movie; it elicited emotions. From that moment on, I was like, I wanna do that. It wasn’t just cool skateboarding; it was trying to evoke a feeling of some sort.Finding out more about Spike Jonze expanded my horizons. I was like, Oh, you can make skate videos and movies and commercials. You don’t have to just do one thing. I started trying things — I would make documentaries, find a song and make a music video for it, or make narrative short films with my friends. From there, it became a little bit more serious; I went to film school and met a lot of collaborators.
After film school, I got a really awesome opportunity to come to New York and work at Google Creative Lab as part of a year-long program. I thought I was only going to live here for a year and then move back to L.A., so while I was here I decided to make a film that was a personal project. And that became my Staff Picked film, “3,000 Miles.”
What was it like going from film school to Google?
Looking back, it was the best year of my life. I was in this very creative environment where I was surrounded by people who made things I admired. All the Google ads I saw as a kid were emotional; they told a story. My mentors were the people who made those commercials, so I was surrounded by people I could soak things up from. That was such a great environment for a young filmmaker like myself.Tell us more about “3,000 Miles.”
When I moved to New York, I didn’t know anything about the city. I didn’t have any friends here, so I would go places, discover the city, and film things I thought were interesting, thinking, I’ll make something eventually with all this footage. I just had no idea what. The only parameter I gave myself was, Don’t try and make a travel log film. I knew that if I tried to make something really flashy and cool, I would fall short because the people on Vimeo doing that are so good. I told myself, Whatever you make, try and make it personal and hopefully something only you can make. Something that’s a reflection of how you felt moving here.And then as my year was coming up, my phone died, and when I turned it on, I got a message that was like, “You have 100 unread voicemails.” When I listened to them all, they were moving and emotional and funny. The idea of collaging them with the footage I shot excited me. It felt fresh. Once I put the voicemails underneath the footage, I was like, I think this can work.
How did it feel to get a Vimeo Staff Pick?
Seeing “3,000 Miles” get Staff Picked was wild. To rewind a little bit: in college, I took a class and DANIELS — who are Vimeo legends — came in as guest speakers. I had already been a huge fan of their work; they shared this little tidbit that was like, “When we were in film school, we didn’t want to compare ourselves to the best people in our class because it’s such a small pool. We wanted to compare ourselves to the best filmmakers in the world.” Then they were like, “…and that’s Vimeo Staff Picks.” From then on, I thought, Oh my God, I need to watch more Staff Picks.When “3,000 Miles” got Staff Picked, it was the first thing I made that got any sort of attention outside of my immediate network. Not saying I blew up, but it got more attention than I was anticipating. I had worked on it for so long and it was so personal that when I put it out, it wasn’t like, What’s the release plan? Literally, I finished it and three hours later, I put it online.
About a week later, I was in the airport and I saw that I got a Staff Pick and I was like, Whoa. It felt big because I had watched Staff Picks for so long, and this was my first one. It was really cool because it wasn’t a client thing. It was just this really pure form of expression.
