By: Abbie Wilson
Cheryl Wenjing Xia is an LA-based Production Designer and a graduate of ArtCenter College of Design. In contemporary advertising, audiences often assume that anything extreme, alien, or impossible is likely to be handed off to visual effects. If it’s off-world, if it’s surreal, if it’s “too big,” it’s probably CG. Cheryl Wenjing Xia doesn’t completely accept that logic. For her, a space that only exists as an idea doesn’t yet have breath. A space only becomes a story once it’s physically built, lit, touched, dirtied, and stressed by real bodies. Her work lives in that conversion: taking places that don’t exist on this planet and making them feel as though they could exist on camera.
Her production design for Amazon: We Go Places, directed by Carlos Mario Rodriguez, is one expression of that approach. The spot follows two aliens living a modest, almost survival-level life on a distant planet — until they discover one of humanity’s “greatest services,” and everything shifts. None of this happens on Earth. The world is set on a failing, exhausted, improvised planet. That means the environment can’t look sleek or futuristic in a clean sci-fi way. It has to look like people — or in this case, beings — have been patching it together for years just to keep going.
Xia built that world around functional decay. The living space is cracked, oxidized, and dusty. Surfaces don’t look designed; they look repaired. Piping is clamped in place with mismatched hardware. Panels are taped and re-taped. Edges are scorched, dented, and overpainted. Nothing feels new because nothing, in their world, would be new. This isn’t aspirational sci-fi. This is survival sci-fi.
Photo Courtesy: Wenjing Xia
Still from Commercial Amazon We Go Places
Directed by Carlos Mario Rodriguez
That philosophy extended to the alien tech. One of the core props in the spot is a handheld scanner used by the aliens. It couldn’t feel like a toy or a glossy “space gadget.” It needed to feel like an everyday tool from another civilization — customized, worn, borderline failing, still in service. Xia and product designer Tyler Yuan went through multiple design passes on that device, not just sketching shapes but asking functional questions: How is it held? Is it designed for one hand or two? Has it been repaired? Does it read as modular? Is it scanning, sampling, tracking energy, or doing something we don’t even have language for? The prop had to feel like it came from a culture with its own engineering logic, not from a prop house.
After rounds of iteration, they landed on a hybrid build: a 3D-printed core structure, then surface finished by hand. The printed shells were sanded, scored, textured, and then aged through layers of spray paint and distress work so they wouldn’t read as “freshly fabricated plastic.” Instead, they photographed like equipment that had been passed down, patched, and kept alive in a collapsing world. The result wasn’t just visually convincing in wides; it held up in close-up, in hand, in motion. The prop didn’t sit in the scene. It participated in the scene.
That instinct — build the world instead of hinting at it — carries into a different tone entirely in Shazam: Unleash the Beat, directed by Regina Gutierrez Wilson, another project Xia designed. The premise: a group of musicians must identify songs under time pressure. But instead of placing them on a clean, game-show-style stage, the piece traps them in a bunker. It’s messy, nuclear retro, almost paranoid. It feels like a broadcast cell buried under concrete, part Cold War shelter, part illegal studio, part fever dream.
Here, Xia wasn’t designing outer space. She was designing psychological pressure.
Photo Courtesy: Wenjing Xia
Still from Commercial Shazam Unleash the Beat
Directed by Regina Gutierrez Wilson
The bunker is layered with audio gear, and nothing matches. Vintage amps sit next to hacked-together speaker guts. Analog consoles bleed into half-open metal cases and exposed wiring. Newer tech is forced into ancient housing. The room feels jury-rigged, stolen, reassembled. You get the sense that people have been living in this place, arguing in this place, making things in this place at 3:17 am when they should have gone home. It’s not neat because it shouldn’t be neat. It’s not cinematic “chaos.” It’s lived chaos.
That mess isn’t random. Xia uses it to set the emotional temperature of the story. This is supposed to be a game, but it doesn’t feel safe. The walls hum. The cables crawl. The table is too close to the gear. The countdown feels like it matters. The space tells you — before any performance does — that time is a threat, not a format. In other words, the set is doing narrative work.
When you lay these two projects next to each other — the off-world survival den in Amazon: We Go Places, and the bunker-room pressure cooker in Shazam: Unleash the Beat, you start seeing the throughline in Cheryl Wenjing Xia’s practice. She’s not just delivering art direction. She’s manufacturing belief.
Her process starts with a world that, technically speaking, doesn’t exist. Then she asks: if it did, how would it age, how would it break, how would someone fix it with limited resources, where would they stand, where would they reach, and what would they be scared to touch? Those questions drive not just the overall set, but also every object inside it.
That level of world logic doesn’t go unnoticed. Amazon: We Go Places went on to receive notable attention in advertising and craft circles, earning four National ADDY Awards, Young Ones One Club Silvers in Art Direction and Direction, a Young Director Award (YDA) Silver, five Telly Awards, four Bronze Clios, two Bronze wins at New York Festivals, the London Shiny Award, multiple Berlin Commercial shortlists, a London 1.4 Awards shortlist, and two AICP shortlist recognitions. Shazam: Unleash the Beat followed with significant recognition of its own, including Berlin Commercial Official Selection, a Bronze at the 45th Telly Awards, Young Director Silver, Gold ADDY, two Young Ones Awards, three Bronze Clios, AICP shortlist, and 1.4 shortlist.
That’s the core of her practical imagination: from alien ruin to nuclear bunker, she treats the environment as an active force, not a backdrop. She doesn’t design frames that look cool. She builds places that feel inevitable.
Contact info: xia2rt@gmail.com
Website: xia2rt.com
