HKU JC WISE Documentary - Rivers Drained

This is the second episode of JC-WISE's documentary series "Befriend Our Waters" — Rivers Drained (水盡河非).

The urbanisation process of Hong Kong has left the city’s rivers devastated; many rivers have actually disappeared. Our city is located in the subtropical, and she has thus recorded distinct seasonal rainfall patterns. Most of Hong Kong’s rivers are intermittent, recording variable volume of water flow between seasons. Human interventions, such as waterworks, flow interception, and channelization, have seriously disrupted river flow in the lower courses, resulting in habitat deterioration and biodiversity losses. What is an "environmental flow" regime? Would it point to a remedy that could help rehabilitate our rivers? To what extent, and how, could Hong Kong learn from successful stories from other cities in revitalising a city’s rivers?

In collaboration with the research team at HKU, an educational and entertaining documentary has successfully drew the attention of the public society. The challenge of this project was the government regulation during the pandemic. We kept the size of production small and reply more on the post-production side. Mixed reality installation is incorporated in the scene explaining the water flow with and without the dem. This further helps the audience to understand the content through the visualisation.

Another challenge was the intense competition of social media content on Youtube. Since our target audience is general public in Hong Kong, we understood river is an unfamiliar topic. From content to illustration, we keep things simple and easy to digest. 5-min short documentary series were the great prelude in raising public’s interest in understanding waters.

To learn more about JC-WISE project, feel free to visit https://www.jcwise.hk​ for more details.

CLIENT Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong

ROLE Project Management | Direction of photography | Art Direction