After the first time Tim Yip, the Oscar-winning art director and costume designer and Alan Macfarlane sat down to have a conversation, Alan wrote that he felt “a strange affinity with his ideas. A brother spirit.” From those forty-five minutes sprouted a series of interviews over Spring 2023 in which the two transcended borders – both in the literary and figurative senses. Tim tells a story of an ever-doodling schoolboy who always stood out from the crowd, and Alans listens inquisitively, always asking the right questions.

Tim Yip is a Hong Kong art director and designer for fiction films. He is best known for his work on the 2000 martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction. Yip also won a BAFTA award for the film's costume design.