Busy business in Hong Kong

Business stories are… just that, stories. Indeed, in business, we can find all the elements of the hero’s journey, and at The Hong Kong Fixer, we are obsessed by the art of storytelling with the moving image.

People at the heart of an enterprising adventure can be seen as characters, humans with a purpose, a dream, a call to action. This call can be seen as the “precipitating incident”, propelling the character on their journey. They see a problem that they set out to resolve, and along their path, find problems to solve, generating value.

The challenge

So when we were asked by InvestHK, Hong Kong’s foreign direct investment promotion department to conceive, plan and produce a series of 27 videos highlighting business success stories, we saw an opportunity to not only stretch our creative muscles, but equally importantly, our production capabilities and systems. The goal? To present successful businesses covering a wide range of industry verticals and go beyond the basic idea, “hey, we have a powerpoint that we want to turn into a classic interview”.

The work

We proposed a series of mini documentaries that would be framed in a general TV series like format. We came up with the concept of “informative humanity”, keeping our true North to always look for what makes the story of business appealing to us: people. This translated into really getting to know your interviewees, and finding something about them that we could add as a story element: Gloria, the scientist likes to ride a bicycle to work, Andy raves about BIM modeling for architecture design.

Also keeping in mind that we wanted to keep the audience of potential global investors and entrepreneurs interested. We went beyond the “about us” line of questioning to really provide “insider’s tips”, on how to successfully establish a business in Hong Kong. From the core information on how to access government funding, learning about key sales figures in e-commerce, listing regulations for start ups, to how to set a base in the GBA and make it in the web3 space… there is plenty to learn in the series.

As for the format, our constant obsession has been to produce high quality cinematic content, using prime cinema lenses and paying particular attention to the lighting set up, and of course working with best in class crew and partners. Each piece was in itself a little cinema experiment, sometimes playing with color, sometimes with effects, sometimes with shot techniques such as the “long shot”. What fun we had!

The result

The campaign has proven a great success for the client, generating tens of thousands of views and inquiries to set up businesses in Hong Kong. And we are now equipped to help more brands deliver great cinematic content, at scale.