Meet Julia Ongchoco | Film, Production, Cognitive Science

We had the good fortune of connecting with Julia Ongchoco and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Julia, do you have a budget? How do you make lifestyle and spending decisions?
My phone has a ‘shortcut’ to a finance web application that I’ve actually been developing. Every time I make a purchase, I open this app and plug in the expense — and this automatically goes into a Google spreadsheet that keeps track of my budget, all my savings, expenses, and how much I have remaining to spend per category (say, my groceries, or camera equipment). When I transitioned to the film industry, I was really anxious about how much I would actually earn and how I would be able to survive in New York. This streamlined management of my finances frees up mental space so I can just have coffee with a friend or buy my camera equipment completely guilt-free! And so while officially, my ‘day job’ is in a film production company, my sideline / favorite hobby is actually tinkering with Google spreadsheets and developing web apps that interface with these.

(By extension, on top of the production assistant work I do for Library Films, I’ve also been developing personalized spreadsheets and web apps for the camera men, editors, and producers. I’ve made apps that help with archival footage logging, field card reports, and asset management. It’s really cool when play becomes work, and work becomes play this way!)

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
Film and documentaries have always been a part of my life in some way or another. Whether I was acting out stories on stage with the high school drama club or glued to the TV watching National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, it’s always been there. But it was always just a pastime, not a profession. The turning point was really when I sat in on a film shoot in Philadelphia. I was mostly bringing people coffee and carrying camera equipment — but even then, the conversations with the film crew were what I had been missing in other job recruitment events I was going to at that time.

But I was a cognitive science major with no film industry connections. In college, I had immersed myself in a mix of psychology, linguistics, and computer science classes. I had no idea where to begin getting experience in film. I started looking at film-related school programs and networks. Through this, I got the opportunity to fly to Kenya and work with a refugee organization called FilmAid. Then I reached out to the only person I knew in film—a recent graduate I’d met over Zoom—who was moving to LA to pursue filmmaking. After a chain of introductions starting with her, I eventually got connected to someone who worked in documentaries in New York. Then I started making my own films — through a grant that I was awarded by the Sachs Program for Arts & Innovation. Experience by experience, I was building up my career in film from scratch.

My brand is about bringing seeming opposites together. In my first short film, “Grid.” I juxtaposed the views of an artist and scientist who unexpectedly see eye-to-eye through the grid and their fascination with Agnes Martin. I really love it: I love watching footage from one person to another and finding the ways they’re speaking with each other, in their similarities and their differences, even though they are not at all in the same room. In a lot of ways, this practice of synthesizing across opposite sides of spectrums has been representative of my own journey in the industry — as I’ve tried to figure out how to be a cognitive science major in film, or how to transform film through computer science, or how to take the stories of my childhood and from them, learn to tell stories of my own.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I’m currently based in New York around the Hudson Yards area and work around Soho.

Here are the three things I love about New York that would go into any itinerary: hand-pulled spicy cumin lamb noodles, orange sunsets that peek through skyscrapers, and there’s always something happening — a reading or stand-up comedy show — down in Brooklyn or Broadway. I would make sure my friend would have the “stage door experience” — a chance to get to connect to the people off-stage. For example, upon leaving the show “New York, New York”, I saw the stage door of the theater right beside, where Chris Sullivan (a star of the TV series “This Is Us”) was doing “The Thanksgiving Play” at the time. I didn’t even watch the play, I just saw him come out of the stage door — and I started tearing up. His storytelling got me through the toughest of times in college and the pandemic.

Maybe a common theme across all my favorite parts of New York is that the best way to experience New York is to just let it happen to you. I think of these serendipitous encounters, random chats I’ve had with people on the subway, stories from a waiter at Red Paper Clip, a Michelin star restaurant, about his 10-year journey working there. The city captures what I love about documentaries — which is all about peeling off the layers on the surface to uncover the story underneath.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I was coming from my first-ever film shoot one October day back in 2021, when I called my family and told them that I wanted to stop doing product management, and instead go all-in on my passion for filmmaking. They responded with a mix of shock, joy (that I found my passion!), confusion, excitement — and since then, they have felt all the best and worst emotions with me as I learned to navigate the industry. Then there are my mentors Mike, Sydney, Stacy, and Chris. It’s one thing to dream about filmmaking, but it’s another entirely to be in the thick of creating. They took chances on me, and then have stood behind me as I learned to take my chances myself. Finally, stories are told by villages. So to all my cherished friends—memories and conversations with whom ultimately make up the threads of the stories I want to tell through film, thank you.

Website: https://www.juliaongchoco.com/

Instagram: @juliaongchoco

Image Credits
Peter Decherney