We got interviewed by CNN!!! – Phil

About two weeks ago we had a shoot for a new short we’re working on. There was a little something special about this shoot though. umm.. CNN was going to be there! Yes, the Cable News Network. THAT CNN. They were gonna come by to interview us and also capture a little bit of what we do and how we work. It goes without saying that I was a little nervous and leading up to that day I was pretty stressed not just from planning the shoot, but knowing that reporters were going to be there. Here’s how it happened.

About a month ago I opened our email inbox surprised to see a Subject line simply “CNN Interview”. I was thinking, wtf and opened it. A man named Douglas who happened upon us via the AngryAsianMan Top 30 List (THANK YOU AAM!) was interested in doing a piece about us. He thought we were in Cannes (France) and wanted to know if we could meet his producer there. I told him we were in Cannes last year and that we were currently in LA.  He responded “perfect”, they are too and we set up a phone interview. He called and said he was intrigued by our story to which I expanded and sold the ish out of WF to make him believe and understand that, yes, we do have quite the unique story. Douglas said he’d pitch the idea to his producer and get back to me. A couple days later he calls and says the producer gave him the go ahead. He asked if he could come by one of our shoots and do an interview to which I said, of course (even though we didn’t have a shoot planned). It was a good push to start production on the new short.

Here at WF we try not to get too excited about things. I kept down playing it in my head. “Oh, it’s not really gonna be for CNN”, or, “It’s not like it’s gonna be a primetime feature”. Two weeks later, we arrive in Hacienda Heights “New World Plaza” for our shoot and Douglas shows up with his camera man, Bryan…and it was pretty legit. haha. They had their CNN badges and everything (because badges totally make everything legit). The cameraman pulls out a HUGE camera that put ours to shame and they started setting up a nice spot in the plaza to shoot.

I’ve gone on way too long, but I’ll just say it was a really nice experience. We’ve done a lot of interviews, but this by far is the biggest. The best part about it, though, is that Douglas actually seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing. Plus, he wasn’t just hammering at the angle that we were Asian American, he just saw that it was cool that we started a company on our own and developed such a strong fanbase. Even more, the piece he’s putting together is a lot bigger than just an interview with us. He went to USC to talk to a professor about new media/internet. He asked for an interview at UCLA with some “fans/supporters” of ours to get the their take on us. It’s really quite the extensive piece!

(Pics from Kat) Here’s a couple from the interviews last Monday near UCLA. That’s the associate producer (notice badge at hip…oOOoo). They wanted a college looking setting, and that definitely fits. Thanks to Janice for opening up her home and also doing the interview. There’s Kevin on the side. Him and Kat are in the new short.

That’s Bruce. He’s been down for us for years. Awesome guy. Actually the first person to ever bring us out to a university to speak. It was while we were still in school, and he brought us out to Ohio State Univ. Thanks Bruce, Kat, Janice and Kevin for representing WF!

Anywho. There’s one more day where he wants to come to our place to see how we work at home and that’ll be it. I’m not sure when it’ll be ready. Sorry to say, it’s most definitely not gonna be on Anderson Cooper 360 or the Situation Room, haha. But it could be just on the internet. People are assuring me that that’s still a pretty cool deal. Yes, w/out tooting our own horn, that’s pretty friggin sweet and we’re super grateful. We’ll keep you posted on when we get more info. Thanks for reading all that. Thank you to Erich Chen for the photos. Check out his blog for more. And thanks to that plaza for letting us shoot there! We’re so lucky and blessed to have so much support in so many areas. =)