We admit it – we’re real suckers for work that increases our serotonin levels. Show us something that makes us laugh or want to dance and we find it irresistible not to like. But Rob Chiu’s heart-rendering short film Things Fall Apart made us sit up and take notice of his other deeply moving work. We ran into Rob at Stink HQ the other day, so we cornered him to find out more…

Words, poems, whether as a voiceover or graphics, are a potent mix in your work. Tell us where your love of words comes from?

I’m really influenced by music and poetry. Have you seen the Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick? It’s amazing, three hours of poetry, all internal thoughts and monologues.

My intention is to make films that really grab you. I never want someone to look at my work and say ‘oh that looks cool’. That’s failure to me. I try and put my heart on my sleeve and put it out there.

Your work shows an astute understanding of emotionally troubled youth and childhood which you express in a very moving and honest way. Where does this come from? Who wrote Things Fall Apart? Was it a poem?

The film was sort of based on experiences I had during childhood and while growing up. The starting point was an various elements being suspended in space and time, not like a super power kind of thing but like a representation of pent up emotions. I needed to create a story leading up to that image so I wanted to write a story about his parent dying and this kid has to look after himself, and he’s late for school and late for his bus and in the end he reaches the point where he just lets go. I wrote it in the way a kid would speak so I put myself in the mindset of a four year old and wrote it that way. I recorded my son reading the words in my car and used that.

Tell us about Fear/Love which you wrote, directed and edited…

Fear/Love was a collaboration with an urban youth program called the I Care Revolution. They gave me the key parts of the story they wanted to hit, they wanted to talk about guns, knives, gangs, identity, lack of identity so I was like “um, that’s a lot of things to cover in a short film with one lead character” so I came up with the idea of having three characters presented Magnolia-style so that you have three characters who never really meet each other but their actions intersect tangentially.

The I Care crew and I came up with a concept of a girl who wakes up in the morning and looks out the window and she really doesn’t know what happened the night before. You have a kid who comes from outside of London – which is about identity and he wants to become part of the gangs and he wants to be hip. And you have a drug dealer who wants to get out, who wants to have a normal life. And I automatically had a vision of a kid in a field of golden grass, a girl at a window and a kid with a hood up on top of a rooftop.

They are the immediate visuals I saw and they became the points in the film where they were the only points where they reflect on what is going on. It’s weird.

Where does your technical skill, all the 3D and motion graphics come from?

I started off as a graphic designer working in design agencies for four years or so and I always loved the multi-layered approach inspired by Attik. I did a part time degree in Manchester while I was working as a senior creative and I taught myself the software that I used to make my final piece.

I went into animation because I didn’t have the money or facilities to shoot in film. I didn’t like the look of DV much so I couldn’t do what I wanted to do with film but I could in animation so I made a film called Black Day To Freedom which is about the Iraq war and refugees. My brother did the drawings in After Effects which gave the film a distinct 3D look. That’s where I really started doing story telling and then I got more into live action again when HDV came out as it was better quality.

So now are you focusing on live action or animation?

In my head I’m live action but I can still incorporate After Effects – if someone asks me to do it that’s fine. I never want to stop editing though. And I love grading things. I like to be hands on without being roped into rotoscope and keyframe.

Now I’m using Red cameras and Canons and have budgets. I still do a lot of the post myself but it does take a lot of time. I shot a piece in Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games and I did all the post myself – grading and everything. I made the film over the course of 2 ½ weeks all in After Effects – the graphics and the grade. Additional animation – the logo at the end – came from the agency.

Same with Else Mobile I did all the grading, editing, etc at home which is fairly crazy.

Signing to Stink last year must have given you more scope to create bigger projects?

I’ve just finished a film for Cartier through Stink in Paris, it’s not out yet, but I didn’t do the CGI on that, I don’t do 3D stuff. That was pretty insane. We went to Buenos Aires for two weeks – one week for prep and one week for shooting. Lots of locations, I’ve never had a crew that big…

Last September for Else I had a DP and three camera assistants and I was ‘wow that’s a lot of people’ and with Cartier I would never know all of the people on that set, it was massive. There were 50 extras. That’s probably not a lot for some directors but for me it was ‘whoa this is great’, a really good experience.

And you’ve dropped the moniker of The Ronin now right?

For the time being, yeah. I started as the Ronin when I left my last job – it means samurai with no master. In ancient Japan when a master samurai was killed the samurai became guns for hire, while some became artists and philosophers and they were known as Ronin, the guy with no master. At the time I was working 18 to 20 hours a day for someone else and I decided that I needed to be my own boss and that’s where the name came in.

I tried to create the illusion that The Ronin was bigger than just me so that I could get bigger clients in but now I don’t need to do this as much now. But I want to keep hold of the name… just in case I ever set up a post-production company.

To see more of Rob Chiu’s work go to www.stink.tv and http://theronin.co.uk. And check out the Dazed Digital feature on Fear/Love here: http://tinyurl.com/robchiudazed

Stink will be screening Fear/Love in London soon.