Apple and TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai's 'Little Garlic' is a nearly 16-minute Lunar New Year film shot entirely on iPhone 15 Pro Max, directed by Marc Webb in
Apple Shot on iPhone 15 Pro Max Little Garlic Redefines Chinese New Year Storytelling
Apple's "Little Garlic" is a nearly 16-minute narrative short film shot entirely on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, produced by TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai and directed by Marc Webb, released in January 2024 as Apple's annual Chinese New Year campaign film for the China market.
The campaign sits within Apple's globally orchestrated Shot on iPhone franchise, which, according to Fast Company, launched in 2015 with 77 photographs from 73 iPhone users across 25 countries. By 2024, the Chinese New Year iteration had become one of Apple's most anticipated annual creative events, with "Little Garlic" representing the seventh installment in that lineage, as reported by shots.net. For this edition, Apple and TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai positioned the film as one of three product-demonstration short films produced simultaneously for China, Japan, and Mexico, underscoring the global scale of the Shot on iPhone platform while keeping each narrative rooted in local cultural truth.
In China, the Lunar New Year holds singular commercial and emotional weight, and Apple has consistently used this calendar moment to demonstrate the iPhone's filmmaking capabilities at their most ambitious. "Little Garlic" centres on a young girl named Wei, whose classmates mock her appearance with the nickname "Garlic Nose." Her grandfather's unconditional love anchors the story, while a magical ability to morph into anyone she wishes drives the plot forward. Over a sweeping arc that moves from childhood to adulthood and from provincial warmth to metropolitan anonymity, the film delivers a thesis on self-acceptance that resonates well beyond China's borders. The Drum's Amy Houston, writing on January 30, 2024, described the film as a poignant story about a girl struggling with appearance and identity, noting its particular relevance to Gen Z insecurity in China and beyond. The Clapboard Score for "Little Garlic" stands at 78 out of 100, reflecting strong creative execution and strategic coherence.
Apple's strategic choice to anchor "Little Garlic" in a coming-of-age identity narrative reflects a precise reading of the Chinese consumer landscape in early 2024. The China smartphone market grew 6.5% year over year to 69.3 million shipments in the first quarter of 2024, according to IDC. Within that expanding market, Apple's own China shipments declined 6.6% year over year in the same period, also per IDC, creating a competitive pressure that made brand-level emotional resonance more critical than ever.
In China, Apple faced intensifying competition not only from Samsung — which held 18.0% global share with 223.4 million units in 2024, according to IDC — but more acutely from domestic rivals including Xiaomi, which grew 15.4% year over year to 168.5 million units globally in 2024, per IDC. Huawei's re-emergence in the premium segment of the Chinese market, widely reported by CNBC throughout 2024, added further urgency to Apple's need to reinforce its cultural relevance and aspirational positioning among Chinese consumers at a moment when hardware differentiation alone was insufficient.
TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai's strategic response was to move away from the operatic scale of some previous Lunar New Year campaigns and instead pursue emotional intimacy. The insight driving "Little Garlic" is rooted in a truth that cuts across generational lines in China: the tension between social conformity and individual identity is acutely felt by younger Chinese consumers navigating social media's amplification of appearance-based judgement. By placing that tension inside a multigenerational family story — a format with deep cultural resonance during the Lunar New Year period in China — the campaign aligned Apple's brand values of creativity and individuality with the precise emotional register its target audience was experiencing.
Marc Webb directed "Little Garlic" using the iPhone 15 Pro Max as the sole capture device throughout the film's nearly 16-minute running time. Webb is known internationally for feature films including The Amazing Spider-Man, as reported by shots.net, and his involvement elevated the campaign's production ambition and global press visibility simultaneously. The entire film was shot using the iPhone 15 Pro Max's Action and Cinematic modes, as documented in Apple's own making-of material, turning the production itself into a live demonstration of the device's professional filmmaking capabilities.
Webb's directorial approach balanced the film's grand visual scope with an insistence on human-scale storytelling. Speaking in the campaign's making-of clip, Webb noted that the rapid physical transformation sequences demanded particular technical discipline: "Doing these quick shape-shifts, the camera has to be fast enough to hide the transitions," he explained. This practical challenge became a creative asset, requiring the production team to exploit the iPhone 15 Pro Max's mobility and responsiveness in ways that a conventional cinema camera would have made more cumbersome. The result is a film that moves fluidly between intimate domestic interiors — a grandfather's kitchen, a school corridor — and the vertiginous scale of a modern Chinese metropolis, with skyscrapers and midtown street life providing the backdrop for Wei's adult disorientation.
TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai's creative team built the narrative architecture around a single symbolic object: the grandfather's homemade steamed buns, which recur throughout the story as a material expression of unconditional love and authentic identity. This kind of culturally specific, sensory storytelling is a hallmark of the Shanghai studio's approach to the Chinese market, where food carries layered familial meaning during the Lunar New Year season. Production credits beyond Webb's directing role are not comprehensively documented in publicly available sources, though the campaign was produced through TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai in collaboration with Apple.
No independently verified third-party performance metrics for "Little Garlic" — including view counts, earned media valuations, or sales attribution data — are publicly available as of this writing. What the public record does confirm is the campaign's context within a commercially significant period for Apple in China. As noted by IDC, Apple's China shipments declined 6.6% year over year in Q1 2024, the precise window in which "Little Garlic" was released, making the film's role as a brand-equity investment rather than a direct-response vehicle structurally appropriate.
The Drum's Amy Houston praised the film on January 30, 2024, as a poignant and culturally resonant piece of work, lending it editorial credibility in the international advertising press. The campaign's reception on Reddit's advertising communities, as observed across multiple threads, reflected strong organic engagement from both creative industry professionals and general audiences, with particular discussion of the film's emotional effectiveness and the technical achievement of its cinematic quality.
Structurally, "Little Garlic" demonstrates the dual-function logic that makes Apple's Shot on iPhone campaigns among the most strategically efficient in the electronics category. The film simultaneously operates as a brand narrative — reinforcing Apple's identity as a tool for human creativity and self-expression — and as a product demonstration, with the iPhone 15 Pro Max's Action and Cinematic modes performing visibly throughout a nearly 16-minute showcase. This architecture means the campaign earns both emotional attention and rational consideration from a single piece of content, a compression of function that explains the Shot on iPhone franchise's enduring effectiveness across nine years of continuous deployment, as the lineage documented by Fast Company and shots.net makes clear.
Apple's "Little Garlic" is a nearly 16-minute Lunar New Year film shot entirely on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, produced by TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai and directed by Marc Webb. Released in January 2024 for the China market, it tells the story of a girl named Wei navigating identity and self-acceptance across childhood and adulthood.
Marc Webb directed "Little Garlic" for Apple and TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai. Webb is known for feature films including The Amazing Spider-Man, as reported by shots.net. He used the iPhone 15 Pro Max's Action and Cinematic modes throughout the production, exploiting the device's mobility to execute the film's rapid transformation sequences.
Yes. The entire nearly 16-minute film was shot on the iPhone 15 Pro Max using Action and Cinematic modes, as documented in Apple's making-of material. This made the production itself a live demonstration of the device's professional filmmaking capabilities, reinforcing the Shot on iPhone campaign's dual function as both storytelling and product showcase.
"Little Garlic" follows Wei, a schoolgirl mocked for her appearance with the nickname "Garlic Nose," who discovers a magical ability to morph into anyone she wishes. The narrative spans her life from childhood to adulthood in China, culminating in a self-acceptance message anchored by her grandfather's homemade steamed buns as a symbol of unconditional love.
"Little Garlic" is Apple's seventh annual Chinese New Year film installment, according to shots.net, within the broader Shot on iPhone franchise that launched in 2015, as reported by Fast Company. TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shanghai produced it as one of three simultaneous short films for China, Japan, and Mexico, demonstrating the global scale of Apple's annual Lunar New Year creative strategy.
Apple's China shipments declined 6.6% year over year in Q1 2024, according to IDC, the same period "Little Garlic" was released. The China smartphone market grew 6.5% overall in that quarter, per IDC, with domestic rivals including Xiaomi gaining ground. The campaign functioned as a brand-equity investment during a period of intensified competitive pressure in China.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
