Simon Sin Yiu-wah, creative services director at Celestial Movies, says working in film and TV production can involve long hours without enough sleep, but his interests in this area keep his passion alive.
I've been working in this field since 1993 after I finished my studies in the United States. It is a fun industry to be in. It's a lot of hard work but if you love film and you are into culture, the amount of satisfaction you get is enormous.
I studied media communications in the US. In the summer of my final year of study I returned to Hong Kong and worked for Commercial Radio Hong Kong.
After graduation, I had offers from TVB, ATV and Star TV, but I chose Star TV which was a start-up at that time. I began as an assistant production manager. My main duties were to arrange shooting schedules and other administrative tasks involving lots of paper work.
The job introduced me to lots of producers and in 1995 I switched to doing production. In 2000, I joined Mei Ah TV where I learned about film production. Then, in 2003 I joined Celestial Movies.
My department is responsible for channel packaging, on-air promotion and programming; basically everything you see on the TV screen.
Our work can be very time consuming. Everyone can finish a piece of work, but whether it will stand out depends on how much time you are willing to spend on it. If you want your work to be outstanding, you need to work extra hard.