Abigail Hing Wen Steps Behind the Camera in Directorial Debut, “The Vale – Origins”
About ten years ago, New York Times bestselling author Abigail Hing Wen conceived a manuscript about AI. Her agent told her it was too early for its time, so she shelved it and instead published her Loveboat, Taipei trilogy in the years that followed, and executive produced the Netflix film Love in Taipei. After a series of coincidences, she picked the story back up and published the book in 2025 under the title The Vale.
In 2026, Wen stepped behind the camera for her directorial debut, adapting the book into The Vale – Origins, a live-action and animation hybrid short film. The film stars Tony Award winner and Disney Legend Lea Salonga, known for her roles in Mulan, Aladdin and Miss Saigon. In addition, Emmy-nominated director John Aoshima was enlisted as the animation director. The Vale – Origins follows the Lees, a grieving inventor family in Silicon Valley who find healing and connection through their young son’s creativity in The Vale, a virtual reality fantasy world they built together.
The film premiered at San Diego Comic-Con to a room of more than 800 people — so packed that attendees had to be turned away at the door. Two weeks after her directorial debut at SDCC, Wen spoke with EnVi about the decade-long road to bringing the film to life.
Spoilers ahead.
From Pages to Screen
Living in Silicon Valley gave Wen a firsthand view of emerging technology. Ten years ago, she was at the heart of the AI revolution as it began seeping into daily life. At the time, Wen was working in venture capital focused on AI, which inspired her to write a story about democratizing access to the technology. “I wrote this book about an inventor family that creates a virtual fantasy world, and the adventures that this hero has with this powerful technology, but also building this creative universe out for himself,” Wen explained.
“My agent at the time told me how no one is familiar with the concept of AI, how nobody is going to read this book. And you know, she was right, so I buried the novel.” Instead, she branched to a different path and met numerous producers, and eventually connected with someone producing hybrid live-action films at Netflix that combined live action with animation. “I was thinking about becoming a director, and I’ve got this novel that requires going back and forth between the real world and animated virtual world.” It felt like the right opportunity, and she decided to pursue it.
One of the reasons Wen wanted to make this short film was to portray how important this world is to Bran. “It’s not just another video game or a fancy set of technologies. It’s family for him,” Wen explained, picking up a palm-sized crocheted doll of an elf wearing a tall, red mushroom-shaped hat and a long blue coat, known as Gnomly, Bran’s best friend in The Vale. “In the film, you find out that he was supposed to have a little brother, and he was excited to have this other companion who could be with him all the time,” Wen adds on how Gnomly came to life. We see Bran treat Gnomly like his brother, exploring The Vale and revealing a deep desire for the world to become real so he can live in it forever. That desire becomes Bran’s ultimate conflict, and we watch him learn to let go of The Vale and live in the real one.
The Mindful Ethics of AI
In both her writing and legal career, Wen has focused on “how we make calls about what’s right and what’s wrong.” Before moving to Silicon Valley, Wen studied at Columbia Law School and clerked for Judge Judith Rogers on the D.C. Circuit. She also worked on tech and innovation policy. In 2008, she moved to Silicon Valley, and as her legal and tech career progressed, Wen began writing novels, encouraged by her family.
The characters in The Vale – Origins depict Bran’s struggle to balance real-life relationships and creating technological advancements mindfully. “It’s important for everyone. Young people, older people, to be equipped, to know how to use this tool,” Wen pointed out. She stressed how crucial it is to have empathetic and principled individuals behind the development of those technologies, noting that people who read books or watch films tend to become more empathetic by walking in another character’s shoes.
Her current work in AI, ethics, privacy, also ties closely to this film .“The frontline engineers that build this technology, they’re going to shape the ethics of it. They need to be able to see all the issues and design good systems from the ground up,” she said, and that is exactly what the Lee family does. We see Addy (Lea Salonga) and Kyle (Robert Palmer Watkins), Bran’s parents, create characters in The Vale based on his bedroom drawings. They tinker with different materials and reiterate features of the game — all to make Bran comfortable and help him navigate his grief.
Movies Are Worth A Million Words
Apart from curiosity, perseverance is also one of Wen’s biggest driving forces. After stepping behind the camera on Love in Taipei, she grew eager to explore the film industry, taking the opportunity to direct a film. Along the way, she felt the transition from novelist to director came naturally. “My agents told me this is not uncommon for novelists. Because as the novelist, you’re also the director. You have to do everything by yourself. It’s the lighting, the tone, the mood, the characters, what they’re wearing, the costumes, and the pacing. All that is up to the novelist.”
Although storytelling comes as natural as breathing to her, one of the biggest directing challenges Wen faced was writing dialogue. She noted that film pacing moves much faster than prose, since a montage can convey what would take thousands of words in just a few seconds. And the sky is the limit with animation. “You can do even more because an animated character can do very quick actions, a rapid sequence of things that you wouldn’t be able to do even with live action.”
All of it was possible thanks to animation director John Aoshima and illustrator Brandon Wu, who created the illustrations for Wen’s book. “I met John through a group called Stone Soup started by Patrick Lee, who is the founder of Rotten Tomatoes. And we were actually doing the book illustrations simultaneously with the short film, and Brandon Wu acted as the main bridge, the character designer for the short film.” At the same time, Yuna Cheong also designed characters based on her daughter’s childhood drawings — her daughter designed the original Gnomly.
Music At Its Heart
To Wen, filmmaking feels like the sole medium in which the director has to be a layperson in every other art form that touches the film — including being able to speak the composer’s language. Lucky for her, the film’s composer is her own daughter, Andromeda Wen.
Supporting Andromeda felt like part of Wen’s responsibility as a mother, especially since her daughter has been composing since the age of four. Wen helped Andromeda write down her self-composed songs until she was able to do it herself at seven. Part of being a good composer is being able to immerse yourself in the world, and it’s no question that Andromeda was the perfect fit for the job. “She’s lived in The Vale her whole life, she read the books when she was eight,” Wen recalled.
The Vale – Origins notably has little dialogue compared to other short films, giving the music room to do more of the storytelling. This gave Andromeda freedom to shape the score: some moments call for silence and allow the family to sit with their grief, while others call for music that adds a bit of magic — like when the Lee parents land on the idea to build The Vale for Bran.
During the ending credits, audiences are serenaded by Lea Salonga’s voice, singing “Lavender’s Blue.” The song was originally written for a scene where Addy is in the bathroom, “but it didn’t really fit with the vibe in that moment of the film — she felt out of character. It would be too many personalities for our badass roboticist mom to also be this world-class singer,” Wen joked.
Instead of scrapping the idea completely, they turned it around. Andromeda reworked it around an old folk melody, giving Salonga’s lullaby-like vocals the perfect send-off for the film. “It was different from Lea’s prior roles. She had been a Saigon, she’d been a Disney princess. And then to have her sing “Lavender’s Blue” was just, like, the icing on the cake. It was fabulous.”
More to Come
Looking ahead, Wen has numerous projects in the works, including films and various books. One is a graphic novel coming out in summer 2027 called The Fidget Booth. It follows a sixth grader with parents who are Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and who learns to embrace his ADHD in order to overcome various obstacles preventing him from finally adopting a puppy.
Currently, the graphic novel has about 600 illustrations drawn by Maple Lam, an author-illustrator originally from Hong Kong who is now based in Los Angeles. “We are just wrapping up what are called the inks. I’ll be able to see it all in color soon and I’m really excited about it.”
To keep up with Abigail Hing Wen’s future projects, follow her on Instagram or sign up for her newsletter on her website.
Interested in more conversations on the human experience and representation? Check out our interview with Yvonne Chapman!
