Singapore’s Wave Films opens an LA front to pull U.S. productions into Southeast Asia

For a decade, Southeast Asia has sold itself to Hollywood mostly as a backdrop — cheap coastline, cooperative jungle, and crews at a fraction of California rates. Wave Films, the Singapore production-services outfit that has fixed shoots for the BBC, ITV and a wall of global brands, is now making a subtler bet: that the region can originate American and international projects, not merely host them. The tell is where the company is planting its newest executive — not in Singapore, but in Los Angeles.

Wave Films has brought on Dave Ulmer, former chief executive of the Cambodian Broadcasting Service, as an executive producer based in LA. As Deadline first reported, his mandate is to bridge North America’s content industry with Southeast Asia’s production infrastructure, steering U.S. and international shoots toward the region’s stages, crews and locations. It is a business-development posting dressed as a producer credit — a stateside face whose job is to pull work in rather than wait for it to wash ashore.

Founded in 2012 by German producer Jerry Koedding, Wave Films built its name on the unglamorous machinery of international production: permits, fixers, vendor networks and crew spread across Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. Its client roll leans corporate and broadcast — the Macallan, Puma and Finnair on one side, the BBC, arte and ITV on the other. Ulmer’s arrival nudges the company up the value chain, from servicing other people’s productions toward assembling its own.

The hire caps a year in which Wave Films has been consolidating the region’s fragmented production base. It recently folded studio space and equipment rental into a shared ‘infrastructure layer’ with Shooting Gallery Asia and True Colour Media, pitched at agencies, brands and independent creators who need scale on demand. Installing a North America-facing executive is the logical next move: build the pipes at home, then station someone in Hollywood to fill them.

The timing is not accidental. Southeast Asian governments are sharpening tax incentives just as streamers and studios hunt for stages cheaper than a crowded Europe, and Singapore has been positioning itself as the region’s dependable, English-speaking hub. Whether a single Los Angeles desk can convert that appetite into greenlit shoots is the open question.

Wave Films has simply decided the deals will not close themselves from twelve time zones away — and has bought a seat in the room where they start.

Tags: Dave Ulmer, executive-move, Jerry Koedding, Southeast Asia, Wave Films