Mads Nielsen

Hi my name is Shirley To. Toonyun is my Chinese name and my artist name. I was born and grew up in colonial Hongkong. In 1999, I moved to the US to pursue a music career. My dream was to tour the world for Madonna as her bass player.

I didn’t become Madonna’s bass player. As a matter of fact, in the first live concert of Madonna I ever saw, she didn’t even use a bass player. Though, I didn’t feel bad, nor anything like a failure. I did tour the world a bit for other artists by that time. It felt more like I didn’t go far enough.

I thought touring was my dream. But it was not. It was not enough.

So I started writing my own songs. And with Instagram, Twitter and Youtube, audio digital content was just not enough. Like many artists, I started making my music videos, and that’s how this all started.

My music videos all have stories in them. And since they were not scripted, I had to reshoot and reshoot until it all made sense. Sometimes I would spend months and months on just one video.

Eventually I was fed up enough. So fed up I decided to seek help. I asked around to see how I could improve my skill. And finally a drummer friend of mine recommended me to join a screenwriting class.

And that step I took, in 2020, during the pandemic, became a life-changing decision. 

Screenwriting lets my creativity go as far as my brain can stretch. I can write whatever I want and my ideas have somewhere to go now. It’s the most direct form of printing out what is in my brain.

It’s been almost two years. I have finished my first feature of a trilogy, and a pilot and its following episode.

I hope you will enjoy my stories. You can watch my videos on Youtube (under my artist name: Toonyun). 

Thank you for giving me a chance to tell you a bit about myself.