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Irving Cheung Yee-man, a 40-year-old  film production designer and art director, once worked on film production in the Shaw Studio for 69 hours straight without sleeping. She would keep working but not be conscious about what she was doing. “Why am I still working?” was the realisation when her consciousness was delayed. For Cheung, working in the film art department is exciting, despite the high-pressure schedule and irregular working time.  “Few other industries have such a job that people working for it can tell others, ‘hey, I just witnessed an explosion today, or a bank robbery, even flesh-cutting from a corpse’,” Cheung said.  In Hong Kong, the rising popularity of recent domestic films has brought more attention to the film art department, which is often hidden behind the media spotlight and the cheers of moviegoers. As the directorial debut of award-winning visual effects specialist Ng Yuen-fai, the action sci-fi film Warriors of Future has become the highest-grossing Chinese-language film in Hong Kong of all time, taking over HK$80 million at the Hong Kong box office, according to data released by the official social accounts of this film.  With expensive and time-consuming production, Warriors of Future has impressed audiences with its rich visual effects and sparked a media discussion on Hong Kong’s special effects filmmaking.  To achieve the artistic presentation of a film, the art department is responsible for creating the overall visual look of a film in collaboration with the director. An art department is supervised by a production designer whose job can be divided into three stages: pre-production, scene creation and post-production. Production designers will discuss and co-create the backgrounds of the film characters at the pre-production stage when the script has yet to be developed. Then, the production designer will lead the art director and costume designer in …

In a dark room, a woman lit a cigarette and opened a refrigerator. The door was wide open, a pure blue neon glow enveloping her.  This is a classic scene from the 1988 movie As Tears Go By directed by iconic Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, who excelled in using the neon lights in Hong Kong films.  Neon lights have long been a special feature of Hong Kong’s nightscape. Tourist Oh Ae-ran, a Korean housewife, said one of the unforgettable sights of her Hong Kong trip was the numerous neon lights on Hong Kong's streets.  “I was mesmerised by the neon colours that I had never seen in Korea,” Oh said. Another Korean traveller Kwack ho-wook said the neon lights in streets are an exclusive culture to Hong Kong.  “I took many pictures of neon lights at Tsim Sha Tsui. In my view,  neon light makes Hong Kong’s night streets more active,” Kwack said. But over the last decade, the city’s iconic neon signs has been decreasing. Fewer and fewer companies are making them due to the emergence of LED lights, which are cheaper to run and come in more colours." Thousands of neon signs that had been standing for decades were turned into illegal structures overnight in 2010 after the Building Department issued a Minor Works Control System, which requires sign boards not protrude more than 4.2 metres and be at least 3.5 metres above the ground. Media have reported that 90% of the city’s major neon signs have disappeared in the past 20 years. The government Buildings Department has removed close to 7,000 “dangerous advertising signs,” many of them neon, since 2014. But as the number of signs decline for store fronts, Hong Kong's neon culture is shifting to art.  Wu Chi-kai, 55, is one of the last …