About 1UpMedia.

I grew up in Singapore, which is a strange place to fall in love with narrative audio.

The shows I admired most weren't made here. They were BBC documentaries, NPR features, audio drama from studios that treated the form with the seriousness of cinema. I'd download them on commutes and feel something I couldn't name. I was probably 1 of 5 Singaporeans listening religiously. (maybe less!)

So I started 1UpMedia from the audio side. Our first show was Heinous, a true crime narrative made in the Western tradition. For a while we got far. We worked with national broadcasters and placed in international awards they hadn't reached before. But I had access to the numbers, and in Asia, the audio wasn't growing. A senior industry leader told me, more or less, that it never would.

Around the same time, I was surrounded by Asia's other tradition. Studio Ghibli. Studio Mir. The visual culture that's shaped the last thirty years of global aesthetics. And then I learned that much of Western cartoons (even SpongeBob), has had its main animation studio in Asia for decades.

I started thinking about what it would look like to bring the two together. Not by changing what the audio was. By giving it a visual face. Heinous became Grim Asia. It crossed a million organic YouTube views within a year. The narrative audio stayed whole, and unchanged.

That work taught me something that's still the foundation of this studio: the audio is already the work. If the narrative is good, audiences will come, as long as there's a visual presence to make them press play.

A few years on, we get to do this with the broadcasters and publishers I admired growing up. The BBCs, Mediacorps, Spotifys of the world. The series that pulled me through those commutes to school all those years ago.

I'll be damned if I let narrative audio die.

If you've made something you're proud of, we'd love to help give it a visual life. That's why we're here.