Neon Rainwood Studio

Hi! I’m Yujie Zhang, one of the founders and Creative Director of Neon Rainwood Studio. We’re a small creative team based in Hangzhou, China, focused on microdramas and original screen content. Outside of Neon Rainwood, I’m also independently developing a game project called Sleepless Metropolis.

I’ve been making stories for as long as I can remember. When I was a student, I used to write mystery cases and choice-based games by hand, turn them into little “detective notebooks,” and pass them around for my classmates to play. I’ve always loved creating characters, relationships, and fictional worlds. Later, I built several larger story worlds that developed communities of their own, and Sleepless Metropolis became one of the projects I’ve stayed with the longest.

I don’t think I ever really stopped doing this. The format just changed over time. Notebooks and online worlds gradually became games and screen stories.

Our team is small, so everyone wears more than one hat. My mother, Lijuan Zang, has a background in writing and writing instruction, and helps turn our early ideas into full scripts. My father, Xin Zhang, has always been interested in film and directing, and focuses mainly on visual development and character design. My younger brother, Haoxiang Zhang, works on shots and video production. Wenzheng Tang handles more of the engineering side, especially our production workflow and technical pipeline.

When Neon Rainwood first started, most of my own time was still going into Sleepless Metropolis. As our microdrama slate grew, I gradually took on a broader creative role at Neon Rainwood as well, becoming more involved in the stories, characters, visual direction, and final creative review.

My parents were already microdrama viewers. My dad has always loved film and performance, and every now and then he would watch something and say, “Honestly, I think I could make something pretty good too.” My mom has always loved writing, so one evening the two of them basically decided: why not actually try?

The first short they made was an alien-invasion story directed by my dad. They posted it on social media, and the response was much more positive than we expected. He said, “This is what I’ve always wanted to do. I can’t believe I can actually make it now.”

That made the rest of us start wondering if this could become something more serious.

We began experimenting with more original ideas, including Public Anomaly Registry (PAR). It started as a small experimental story world, but more and more people began following the creatures, locations, and connections between different incidents. That was when we realized there might really be something worth building here.

The microdrama format also fits the way we naturally like to tell stories. It’s short, serialized, and gets to the conflict quickly.

For us, the most exciting thing is that it gives a very small team a chance to take stories that once existed only in our heads, make them real, and let other people see and hopefully care about them too.

So far, we’ve completed two full microdrama series: Crowned by the Shadow Fae and The Beast Behind the Glass.

Crowned by the Shadow Fae was our first complete series, so it will always be special to us. It follows a shadow king trapped in a swamp and a witch who has been cast out by her town. Both have been treated as dangerous outsiders, and their meeting ties together revenge, trust, and fate.

It was the first time we went through the full process from story development to production and finally distribution. A lot of the habits and rules we use now were first figured out through trial and error on Crowned.

The Beast Behind the Glass meant something different to us. It follows a young researcher assigned to study a dangerous dragon descendant being held inside a laboratory. As they begin to trust each other, he comes to see her as the only person he can truly trust and someone he has to protect. That relationship pulls them deeper into the secrets behind the laboratory and the people hunting them.

If Crowned proved that we could finish a full series, The Beast Behind the Glass was where Neon Rainwood really started developing its own way of making things.

Our production process became more stable, and I became much more involved in the story and overall creative direction. We even rebuilt quite a lot of material that was already finished. As the project evolved, we became much clearer about what it should be, and much less willing to stop at something we knew could still be better.

What we want from the audience is actually very simple. We want them to care about the characters, wonder what happens next, and want to come back.

We’re also beginning to experiment with a recurring virtual cast, where familiar “actors” can appear in completely different roles across different series. We’d love for viewers to eventually recognize them the way they might recognize a favorite performer.

Our projects don’t always begin with the same person. Sometimes the idea comes from me, sometimes from Lijuan, and sometimes another team member says something in a discussion that makes everyone stop and think, “Wait, we could actually do that.”

Once we have a character, relationship, or central conflict that excites us, we start building from there.

Lijuan normally takes the lead during the script stage, turning rough concepts into a complete story and refining the relationships, pacing, and dialogue.

Once the script is ready, visual development and production planning begin. Xin works on character appearance, environments, and the overall visual direction. Haoxiang and the production team break the script down into storyboards and individual shots. A single sentence on the page can easily become several different shots once you actually have to put it on screen.

Tang handles the engineering side. He builds and improves our workflow, connects the tools and automation we use, and keeps refining the technical pipeline so production is more consistent and efficient.

Once full production begins, the series is divided into episodes and shots among Haoxiang and the rest of the production team. Finished shots go into an early edit, where we adjust pacing, add sound, and remove anything that isn’t helping the scene.

After that, the project usually comes back to me for the final creative review. I look again at the performances, visual consistency, pacing, emotion, episode endings, and whether the story actually works as a whole.

I’m probably also the person most likely to say, right at the end, “No, something still feels wrong. Let’s do it again.”

And sometimes we do. So our process isn’t really a straight production line. We go back and forth between the story, visuals, production, and editing until we feel the version in front of us is worth releasing.

One of the hardest parts of being an independent creator is that, before real audiences see the work, it’s very difficult to know whether your own judgment is right. A team can love a project, spend months working on it, and still discover after release that the audience simply isn’t responding.

So whether I’m working on a microdrama or a game, I try not to confuse “we think this is good” with “people actually want this.”

After releasing Crowned by the Shadow Fae, I started thinking much more seriously about whether some of the testing habits we use in game development could also work for microdramas.

With my game project, for example, I didn’t try to build the entire world at once. The first game focuses on a single district of the city. We use a vertical slice and demo to see whether the story, characters, and core mechanics actually make people want to keep playing before expanding further.

I realized microdramas have a very similar problem. Instead of completing a long series without any audience feedback, we’d much rather make an early section that truly represents the idea, see where people keep watching and where they drop off, and then decide what needs to change or whether the project should grow further.

If I could give another independent creator one piece of advice, it would be to create as many chances for real feedback as possible, and be willing to accept that the feedback may disagree with your instincts.

For me, the most important thing in a great microdrama is whether the story gives people a strong enough reason to keep watching.

With episodes this short, every scene should move something forward. If you give the audience a comfortable place to stop, there’s a good chance they actually will.

Imagine an episode built around a birthday party. If it ends with everyone happily cutting the cake, that feels like a perfectly natural place to stop. But if everything seems calm and one person suddenly changes expression and says, “Wait… does something feel wrong to you?” Now the audience has a new question. What did they notice? What’s about to happen?

A few years ago, I was playing a story-driven game and reached the end of a chapter I still remember clearly. I was playing an undercover character who was about to assassinate an important target. Just as I thought I was going to succeed, he accidentally touched the gun strapped to my leg.

His expression changed.

He looked straight at me.

...And the chapter ended.

Unfortunately, I had also just run out of free energy. The next chapter wouldn’t unlock for several hours. I lasted about fifteen minutes before paying for more energy because I absolutely had to know what happened next.

That experience stayed with me because it taught me very directly what a successful hook actually feels like. It doesn’t just make you think, “That was interesting.” It leaves an unfinished question in your head that you want answered immediately.

Since then, whether I’m working on games or microdramas, I’ve been a little obsessed with those turning points. I love the moment when everything finally seems calm and then one new problem appears.

A good hook doesn’t need to be huge or shocking. It just needs to come naturally from the story and leave the audience thinking, “Oh. This is definitely not over.”

The first thing I would say is: make it exist. It doesn’t have to begin as something complete. Start with the smallest real version you can make.

There’s a line from Clément Sawyer, a character in Sleepless Metropolis, that I’ve always loved: “The brave are terrified, but they move forward anyway.”

I think a lot of people build an entire wall of problems in front of themselves before they’ve even started. But once you actually begin, you usually discover what the first real problem is.

If the budget is too small, reduce the scale. If you don’t have enough experience, make a smaller version first. If your equipment is limited, use what you already have.

Once you start moving, that vague feeling of “I could never do this” usually turns into a handful of specific problems that can be solved one by one.

Get the story out of your head and into the world. You can figure out the rest as you go.

As a new independent team, we didn’t begin with a built-in audience or an established distribution network.

Finishing a series doesn’t mean it will automatically find the people who might love it.

We’ve had to learn how different platforms and audiences work, and how to present a series so that someone who has never heard of Neon Rainwood might actually stop and look. What makes them click on the trailer? What makes them start Episode 1?

That has made us see distribution as part of the creative loop rather than something that only happens after the work is finished. Once a story reaches real viewers, their response becomes information that can shape what you make next.

For a small studio like ours, good distribution isn’t simply about putting the same series in as many places as possible. It’s about finding people who will actually watch, come back, and hopefully care enough to follow the next story too.

That’s when an independent studio really starts building an audience of its own.

When we first came across HeyRuby, it was still a very young platform. Our thinking was pretty simple: this seems friendly to independent creators. Why not reach out and see what happens?

What we definitely didn’t expect was to hear back from David so quickly. At some point in the conversation, Tang mentioned that I was also leading an independent game project, and David asked to see material from Sleepless Metropolis.

I opened the reply, and my first reaction was basically: “Wait… what? ? ?”

It took me an entire day to fully process the fact that the person asking to see my game was David Perry.

But what stayed with me most wasn’t simply that he had replied. It was that he actually read the material.

This world and these characters have been with me for years, but turning them into a real game is still a new stage for me. Having someone with that much experience in the game industry seriously look through the design and then respond to a specific mechanic gave me a very real sense that the idea had actually been seen.

I still remember that feeling. It gave me a huge amount of energy when I went back to development.

As I became more involved with Neon Rainwood’s microdrama projects, I also started working more closely with Tang and the HeyRuby team.

One thing I really appreciate is that they listen when creators talk about what is actually happening during production. Sometimes we mention a problem or throw out an idea, and later we can tell they’ve kept thinking about it. We really enjoy that kind of back-and-forth.

Whether it’s getting a series live, answering everyday questions, or responding to feedback, the team has consistently been direct and responsive. For a young independent studio, the feeling that somebody is actually listening to what you say is incredibly valuable.

At this point, my strongest impression of HeyRuby is that we somehow happened to meet another team that is also still growing, experimenting, and trying new things. Getting to explore some of that at the same time has been a really fun and meaningful part of the experience for us.

Right now, we’re experimenting with several different kinds of stories.

One of our upcoming projects is about an exorcist detective and his “ghost doll bride.” I love trying new character dynamics and new worlds. Personally, I’m especially drawn to mysteries, gangster stories, comedy, and relationships with a lot of tension, so there are usually far more characters and ideas in my head than we have time to make.

Longer term, we want the characters, actors, locations, and stories inside Neon Rainwood to slowly begin connecting with one another and grow into a larger story world of their own.

We’ve already started experimenting with virtual actors appearing in completely different roles across different projects. In the future, we’d love to create more behind-the-scenes content and little “off-camera” moments around them, so audiences can gradually get to know them almost like a recurring cast.

We’re also exploring quieter connections between different stories. Maybe a location, person, or event that seems unimportant in one series will suddenly matter much more in another. We love the idea of viewers eventually noticing something and going, “Wait… are these two stories connected?”

We’d also like Neon Rainwood to help more creators who already have stories or scripts but don’t yet have the production capability to bring them to the screen. As our workflow becomes more stable, we hope to make that production capability available to other storytellers too.

Outside of Neon Rainwood, I’m continuing to develop my long-term independent game project, Sleepless Metropolis. I’ve always been interested in how the same fictional world can live naturally in different forms, whether that’s a game, a short-form series, interactive storytelling, or something else that genuinely fits the story.

You can follow Neon Rainwood Studio on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for new releases, behind-the-scenes content, and upcoming projects. If you enjoy our work, you can also watch Crowned by the Shadow Fae and The Beast Behind the Glass on HeyRuby.

Tell us which characters and stories you love most. For a small team like ours, every person who watches, comes back, and wants to see what happens next means a lot.