The Serene Beauty of Yunnan

This personal travel film was created from my journey through Yunnan and western China, capturing some of the most serene and otherworldly landscapes I have ever seen. Built around the same sense of wonder I felt while travelling across Dali, Lijiang, Shangri-La, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Napa Lake, and Meili Snow Mountain, it aims to immerse the audience in the scale, beauty, and atmosphere of these remarkable places.

More than a simple travel recap, the piece became a way to show a side of China that is still deeply underrated: raw, spiritual, remote, and visually breathtaking. While much of China is often seen through its cities, this film focuses on the mountains, lakes, animals, villages, and high-altitude landscapes that make the western regions feel almost mythical.

The film relied heavily on drone work, handheld movement, and landscape-led storytelling across several different regions of China. Shooting at altitude created real physical and technical challenges. In places like Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, we reached over 4,500 metres, where the air was thin enough that I had to carry supplemental oxygen. Around Meili Snow Mountain and other high-altitude areas, even simple movement became exhausting.

At Yak Meadow, a sudden gust of wind crashed my drone during filming, with the conditions strong enough to shut down the chairlifts. Because of that, I had to be selective with the aerial footage I could capture, making the remaining drone shots even more important to the final film.

The piece also includes handheld horse-riding footage from Napa Lake, which required advanced stabilisation in post to make the movement usable. I captured details of the local environment, including yaks, monkeys, mountain roads, lakes, and wide alpine valleys, to show the unique wildlife and atmosphere of the region.

Colour grading became one of the most important parts of the edit. The light in Yunnan was extremely strong, often overpowering my neutral density filter, so the final look required careful work to recover softness, emotion, and depth. Paired again with "Back to Friends" by Sombr, the edit leaned into a nostalgic and emotional tone, turning the landscapes into something that felt less like sightseeing and more like memory.

The film reached 184K views and 11.2K likes on Instagram, continuing the same emotional response I had seen with my Japan, New Zealand, and Shimanami Kaido projects.

The response showed me again how powerful travel filmmaking can be when it reveals places people may not have considered before. The film did not just show beautiful scenery. It invited people to look past the obvious destinations and recognise the beauty of places that are harder to reach, less familiar, and often left out of mainstream travel culture.

For me, this project became a statement about the kind of stories I want to tell: ones that make people curious, move them emotionally, and remind them that some of the most beautiful places in the world are the ones that ask a little more from you before they let you in.