Not Your Average Storyteller
Advertising industry veteran Kit Ong switches gears to writing tales for children and dabbling in independent filmmaking
Kit Ong switches from advertising to being a children’s storyteller
War, domestic violence and Alzheimer’s disease. These are not typical topics found in children’s storybooks. Yet for 51-year-old Kit Ong, a veteran of the advertising industry with 25 years under his belt, he felt compelled to pen stories that touch on difficult subject matters that are not often discussed with children.
Though he had been working in the advertising industry for more than half his life, he has devoted all his time and effort into growing Ubxed (pronounced ‘Unboxed’), an online repository for his children’s stories. He is also exploring the medium of film with another project called The Kollective Lab that uses themes of horror, sci-fi and mystery to address social issues.
The idea came to him in 2014 when was living in Vietnam and his daughter Mira, who was 10 years old at the time, had questions regarding the regional dispute between several Southeast Asian nations and China over claims to the South China Sea. It was a tense time he recalled, and he felt compelled to write a story that addressed complex issues and make it understandable for children.
The Klang native was inspired to write his first story, titled “Newwland”, as a way for him to express his views about the matter through storytelling. The premise of the story focuses on a magical island that appears and the subsequent war that followed as nations fought to control it. Following the conflict, the island was gifted to children who discover its many wonders. For this story, Ong collaborated with artists Chau Lai and Minh Lam, a Vietnamese mother-and-daughter team, who helped visualise his story and breathed life into his characters.
Four years after his first story, Ong launched Ubxed to coincide with his second one, “Eating the Happiness Eaters” which also delved into another difficult topic, child sexual abuse. He said he was inspired to write the story about the struggles faced by a sexually abused street child due to the rise of the Me Too movement at the time.
Though he writes all the stories in Ubxed, he often
collaborates with different artists to come up with the illustrations for each story. Out of the many stories he has written, Ong says his favourite has to be “The Stars That Pave the Heavens”, which centres around a lost child trying to recover his memory. It explores the subject of memory and the need to care for the elderly, particularly those that suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. He says the story was deeply personal to him, as it was his way of coming to terms with growing old.
In the years since Ubxed’s launch in 2018, Ong has kept himself busy, having penned a total of 16 stories and an additional three more in development. He says he has big plans for the platform, and is looking for contributors and other collaborators to write more stories. He is even exploring the idea of adding short films and even audiobooks to the collection.
“I love to use different mediums to tell stories. It would be a waste to limit myself to just one form of expression,” he says. “I hope Ubxed can be a meeting point for artists and storytellers to collaborate together and tell stories about important topics that are relevant to society.”
Ong’s love for stories goes beyond books, he’s also an avid movie lover, and that led him to dabble in filmmaking more than a decade ago. He recently launched The Kollective Lab, a social commentary film collective hosted on Youtube, where he aims to experiment with different forms of storytelling with films that would appeal to adults.
He describes the project as a continuation of his journey as a filmmaker, which started back in 2006 when he made an experimental film while working in advertising. “I have always loved how collaborative the process of filmmaking can be, it brings together people with different skills and talents to make something wonderful,” he says.
To date he has released one project titled “Transmission” under The Kollective Lab, and it’s the first of a four-part series that combines elements of horror, sci-fi and mystery. Like Ubxed, he is also looking to collaborate with other like-minded storytellers and filmmakers for future instalments. You can find his work on Ubxed at ubxed. com and The Kollective Lab on Youtube.
“I hope Ubxed can be a meeting point for artists and storytellers to collaborate together and tell stories about important topics that are relevant to society”