brianyung-creates

[brianyung-creates]

Warner Music Asia: Social Content Vol. 1

 - 

A selection of social media content I produced as part of the regional creative team at Warner Music Asia. These pieces — delivered weekly to 10 markets — were utilized by local teams on their social channels with a combined 7.5M followers, including Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

I was responsible for each piece from concept to production to delivery. The pieces above are mostly themed around the anniversary of a song, an upcoming album, or a current hit that needs an extra push on social. The goal was to create shareable and engaging content that is visually aligned with the artist’s aesthetic.

For more of my social media work with Warner, check out Vol. 2.

Our team’s work covered the following markets: Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.

[brianyung-creates]

Warner Music Asia: Social Content Vol. 2

-

A selection of social media content I produced as part of the regional creative team at Warner Music Asia. These pieces — delivered weekly to 10 markets — were utilized by local teams on their social channels with a combined 7.5M followers, including Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

I was responsible for each piece from concept to production to delivery. The pieces above range from Happy Birthday's and year-end compilations, to memes and marketing campaign content (localized in various Asian languages). The focus was on creating content that could effectively communicate a singular message.

For more of my social media work with Warner, check out Vol. 1.

Our team’s work covered the following markets: Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.

[brianyung-creates]

Warner Music Asia: Brand Partnerships Reel

 - 

Made in collaboration with the brand team at Warner Music Asia, this highlight reel represents a key part of their pitch to potential brand partnership clients. Set to the rhythm of Lizzo's "About Damn Time", the reel takes viewers on a high-energy tour of the partnerships that the team has done across 11 markets.

[brianyung-creates]

Ed Sheeran: Visiting Butterflies

 - 

"Visiting Butterflies" was a series of multimedia installations that popped up across Asia to celebrate Ed Sheeran's new album, "=". At night, butterflies took over cultural landmarks in each city: ‧ Projected over the historical Tai Kwun in Hong Kong ‧ A water screen on the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok ‧ The giant LED globe outside SM Mall of Asia in Manila ‧ The Plaza Indonesia mega-mall in Jakarta

As the creative producer for the series, I developed visuals based on the album's core art direction. The creative was adapted to make the best use of the unique features of each location, while remaining faithful to Ed's original artistic vision.

[brianyung-creates]

Ed Sheeran: Asia Fan Meet

 - 

Produced all visual creative for Ed Sheeran’s Asia Fan Meet, a virtual fan event that took place in October 2021 to coincide with the release of his new album “=“. Beyond developing key visuals and marketing collateral, I partnered closely with the production vendor to create all motion graphics for the event — everything from lower thirds to pre-rolls to title animations.

Broadcast on Warner Music and partner Facebook pages across nine countries, with a combined reach of 2.5M+ fans, the livestream brought Ed closer to his Asia fans at a time when he’s unable to tour the region.

The event was a core part of the regional rollout of his new album; the other cornerstone of the Asia campaign was the “Visiting Butterflies” installation series — you can read about it here.

[brianyung-creates]

Cardi B + the ship stuck in the canal: a viral meme

 - 

What began as a random idea in my head ended up as a meme that went viral on Instagram.

It was March 2021: the Ever Given container ship was stuck in the Suez Canal, and Cardi B had just put out a song where she says “if it’s up, then it’s stuck” over and over again. Didn’t take long for the dots to connect — so within a day, I delivered a meme that put a playful twist on the news and organically incorporated one of Warner’s newest songs.

It caught the eye of the folks at 9GAG after publication, and they reposted the meme to their page, setting off a chain of viral reactions that culminated in Cardi B reposting it to her own Instagram Story.

6M+ views and 500K+ likes within 24 hours. Millions of organic impressions at a cost of $0. We love memes!

Massive, massive thanks to Angel Chiu of Warner Music HK and the Atlantic Records team for getting this piece in front of the right people.

[brianyung-creates]

Grammys 2021 Content Campaign

 - 

Produced and art-directed Warner Music Asia’s regional content campaign for the 2021 Grammys. Developed a cohesive and dynamic design system that was applied across social platforms (Instagram, Facebook & TikTok) and content types.

Made things like:

- Nominee Spotlights to highlight nominations received by Warner artists - Facebook 3D photos to promote nominees - Live Photo wallpapers, for fans to download via TikTok - Cover art for a Grammys-themed Spotify playlist - Winner congratulations graphics - Performance clips

[brianyung-creates]

Quarantine Airways

 - 

In 2020, we found ourselves in an unprecedented state of motionlessness. I missed the excitement of traveling — that feeling of escaping the bubble of your own home.

Quarantine Airways is a virtual airline experience delivered through a Twitter chatbot. I wanted to recreate the air travel experience in a digital context: Getting your boarding pass. Watching movies set in the city you're visiting. Learning new facts about your destination, and more. I taught myself how to code a Twitter bot from scratch, wrote the dialogue, and consulted airline industry professionals to make sure it all felt authentic. Created a visual identity for the brand, too.

This was also the perfect opportunity for me to plan and run a marketing campaign. The multichannel launch campaign included:

- A website (https://quarantineairways.com) - Instagram content - YouTube and Twitter ads - Digital out-of-home billboards near major transit hubs Fun fact: it's surprisingly cheap to advertise in Times Square, NYC (!).

My hope is for this to be something fun you can enjoy whenever you feel the need to escape for a bit. Check out the full case study at https://quarantineairways.com/fyc.

[brianyung-creates]

Posters for the Skywalker Saga

 - 

A series of alternative posters for films in the Skywalker Saga of the Star Wars franchise. The concept behind the series was to design something for the true fans of Star Wars; something only the fans can fully appreciate.

For each poster, only colors from the film's original payoff poster were used to construct the gradient visual — colors that may seem random to the average viewer, but are instantly recognizable to Star Wars aficionados. Film titles and billing blocks are written in Aurebesh, the well-known writing system from the Star Wars universe. The entire series shares the same graphical layout, one which pays homage to the design of the original Star Wars poster from 1977 — perhaps another detail that only enthusiasts will pick up on.

[brianyung-creates]

Can I Binge?

 - 

Visit the site at canibinge.com. Very pleased to share that the site has won a People Choice’s Award at the 2021 Webby Awards.

Stuck at home with nothing to do besides watching TV? Can I Binge? helps you figure out how long it’ll take to binge a TV show. Maybe it’s that one show you’ve been meaning to watch, or the show that your Twitter mutuals have been raving about, or the show from your childhood that just started streaming. As we all take this moment in time to stay at home so that the world’s essential workers can do their jobs safely, no one’s going to judge you for watching a little more TV than usual. Literally no one’s gonna judge you. So go ahead — binge.

Can I Binge? was conceptualized as a functional and timely tool that helps people decide what to watch in quarantine. The design puts an emphasis on answering the central question, “Can I binge...?”, by making it part of the user interface with an integrated search box. The site adjusts its visuals dynamically every time the user selects a new TV show from the search results; the show’s poster is brought to the foreground, followed by changes to the gradient background made based on a color analysis of the poster.

[brianyung-creates]

An Impersonal Portrait

 - 

Watch the video documentation here: https://vimeo.com/341736519.

An Impersonal Portrait explores the construction of identity in the age of digitized personas. Drawing information from my DNA dataset and my Twitter archive, this data visualization installation assembles data from both sources into a hybrid strand of ‘text-DNA’. An approximation of the strand is simultaneously printed onto a continuous sheet of paper, fabricating a tangible length of this data composite. As text and numbers in a spreadsheet, the two datasets are impersonal by nature, yet they are also deeply personal representations of my identity — my Twitter archive in the emotional sense and my DNA data in the biological sense. While at its conceptual core it is a piece about identity, An Impersonal Portrait remains visually impersonal and scientific, alluding to the neutrality of our digitized personas in today’s technological context — we are, to some extent, just letters and numbers existing somewhere in a database.

Technical details: The letters on-screen come from words that are chosen from my Twitter archive using a DNA-guided method. The program randomly selects a genetic marker (thousands exist in my dataset), and reads the position of the marker on the genome. The genetic position is then mapped onto a time position in my Twitter archive, at which a tweet is selected — for instance, if the genetic marker is located at the very start of the genome, then the program picks the very first tweet in my archive. The contents of the selected tweet undergo a textual analysis process using the RiTa library, resulting in one word being meaningfully picked. The word is printed onto the continuous piece of paper along with the ID of the genetic marker, while its individual letters slowly populate the strand of ‘text-DNA’ being created on-screen.

Created for the 2019 UCLA Design Media Arts Senior Exhibition. Built with Processing. Special thanks to my project advisor Casey Reas.

[brianyung-creates]

Zoolosophy

 - 

Zoolosophy is an attempt to discuss the ethics of zoos from the perspective of animals, encapsulated within the mockumentary medium which, well, doesn't take itself too seriously. The words spoken by the animals, however, touch on important arguments on both sides of the debate. This was an individual class project completed within a three-week time frame. I wrote a draft screenplay, shot footage at the Los Angeles Zoo, and overlaid test recordings over a rough cut. The various speaking parts were then outsourced to voice actors; I made changes to the screenplay based on the initial recordings and completed another round of re-recording. Extensive sound editing and mixing work was done to bring together all of the vocals (13 characters) and foley/sound effects. Attention was also focused on delivering visual allusions to the mockumentary/sitcome genre, including camera pans, handheld effects, and even closing credits.

[brianyung-creates]

I Didn’t Win an Oscar®, But I’m Still a Winner

 - 

Each year on that fateful evening, some particularly talented artists are crowned Oscar winners. But what about all those other nominees that didn’t win? Are they officially “losers” now? The answer is no, of course. But it’s unfortunate that not winning something is often interpreted as losing. Honestly, losing an award you were nominated for could be downright depressing.

The goal of this web experience is to bring a splash of positivity to those who did not get the recognition they’d hoped to receive. Choose a quote from past Oscar speeches to create a custom quote piece for yourself; these past winners won because they never gave up on their craft. This website was made not just for actual nominees, but for all artists: we may not always get the recognition we deserve, but hey, there’s so much more to being an artist than winning awards.

Visit the site at http://users.dma.ucla.edu/~brianyung/projects/project3/.

[brianyung-creates]

Wild Thoughts: Photography

 - 

Photographs taken for Wild Thoughts, a parody wildlife photography book that is meant to be read both as a comedy piece and as a visual study of (at times bizarre) animal behavior. Read more about the idea behind the project and see layout designs from the book here.

[brianyung-creates]

Wild Thoughts: Book Design

 - 

At its heart, "Wild Thoughts" is an animal photography book that — through pairing images with imagined internal dialogue — parodies the ever-popular bookstore staple: the wildlife photography coffee table book. It is intended to be simultaneously read as a comedy piece and as a visual study of (at times bizarre) animal behavior. The physical edition of the book was designed to closely emulate the typical coffee table book, with its fabric-wrapped hardcover enclosed in a glossy case cover, complete with details on the spine and back such as reviews, a barcode, and a list of fictional books coming soon from the same author/creator (soon-to-be-classics like "Wild Thoughts 2: Revenge of the CAA Agents"). As for the original idea behind the book, I give you this excerpt from the book's Foreword (which I wrote as 'Dr. Barnes N. Noble'): "We anthropomorphize with the assumption that these...creatures do not think like we do—that is why anthropomorphizing is a practice of pretending. But the truth is, humans are not that different from animals. As much as we would like to think of ourselves as evolved beings, it is an indisputable fact that humans are animals...And in many ways, these distant relatives of ours behave just like we do."

[brianyung-creates]

Shadows / Silhouettes

 - 

Shadows and silhouettes sculpted by light at the right time and place.

All photos taken on an iPhone.

[brianyung-creates]

Apotheosis: Voice Based Worldbuilding in VR

 - 

"Apotheosis" is a VR worldbuilding experience where you are given the power to create a virtual organic environment using your voice. Designed as a group-based experience, each player has the ability to create new worlds—and the capacity to obliterate existing worlds that they and others have created. Voice recognition and gaze control allow for an intuitive form of interaction that amplifies the creator/destroyer dynamic inherent in the concept. Per-object sound design and a low-poly aesthetic complete this immersive VR experience.

Produced in collaboration with Celynne Hebron at UCLA Design Media Arts. I was responsible for overall coding/VR development in Unity, integration with IBM Watson speech recognition, title design, and sound design.