Taking photos of baby is always a great fun. Lanvy is my friends’ a cute little girl. We decided to go to Clear Lake park for the photo-shoot. It was close by so we didn’t have to go through the crazy traffic of Houston during rush hour.
It was a beautiful day! We had green grass, play ground, and the lake. Lanvy had lots of fun running around with her mom. And I myself also had a lot of fun chasing her for the photos 
.
Enjoy the beautiful weather while it is still here guys!
I have been to Galveston at night before. But it was never for a beach party with bonfire. This time, the invitation was from a new friend that I recently met in a coffee shop. I thought she was really cool with her special interest in drawing and painting.
I decided to join the party to see how it is to do something that I have never done before.
We took the ferry to go to the other side of the island. I went on top of the ferry and looked back at Galveston as it floating away. It was amazing! I took my camera out and try a few night shots. Hopefully, the photos might be able to express what I witnessed at the time.
The party was a lot of fun: the wind kept blowing the tent away; bonfire with wood found a long the beach and the house near by; great beer & tequila rose; music from Cisco, the base guitar; a puppy running around; and more…
It was during last Summer (2010) that I was introduced to the DSLR camera. I had very little knowledge about camera lens. I still remembered when people said things like “Hey, I love that L len you have” or “I dont use Zoom Len, just Prime Len only”. I had no clues what they were talking about. I just nodded my head and said “Yeah, yeah!”.
Fortunately, I was able to borrow a cool camera from a friend, the Canon T2i. It came with a standard len, nothing special. But I loved it. So, I decided to take one weekend to do my mission. I drove to Reliant Stadium area, parked my car and hopped onto the Train. At every single stop, I got out, just walked around and took random photos of buildings and people. It was extremely hot. You can probably imagine the heat of Houston during Summer time trying to burn all the fats that I had. And just my luck, I did not bring any water!
I spent all day walking around, talked to random people and took photos. It was a great experience. If you ever had a thinking of doing something like that, just do it. But you need to keep in mind, the trick was you have to do it all by yourself. Going with someone else, you may go though half of the day and say “Let’s go grab something to eat!”
Have a wonderful day everyone!
(Don’t forget to view it in fullscreen!)
Who doesn’t love eating animal crackers? It’s fun, a little mischievous and makes you feel like a kid again.
Stauffer’s wants to seed and build awareness of the Stauffer’s brand. The task was to create an entertaining and talked about video that people will pass on virally. They were not interested in blatant commercialism, but rather are looking for something very organic.
So, the mission was to make a video out of the little animal crackers. Of course, I had to take the chance and try “Stop Motion” video. A video technique that I have always wanted to do. I went to Walmart and bought a whole bag of Stauffer’s. It was huge and I already finished half of it after making the video. I also needed a special macro len to do close-up shots of the crackers. And, just my luck, I happened to have a friend that has the 100mm Macro L Len.
The gears and the crackers were ready. But those crackers still looked too lame for my video. I decided to do another round of shopping. I went to Michael’s Store and bought some props for the little crackers. I spent the next day drawing and setting up the whole set for my video. It was a lot more work than what I expected. Finally, I got it done. It came out not too bad for the first stop motion video.
Special thanks to An Nguyen for letting me borrow the len. The pictures came out amazing! Please scroll to the bottom for the video. And if possible, view it
I met Uyen the first time at the airport when I went there to pick up a friend from Vietnam. She came to the U.S for her master degree with a group of friends, just like me eight years ago. Uyen had to wait for her relatives to pick her up. So, my friend and I decided to wait with her. And, I had a chance to talk to her.
Thanks to Facebook, I found her online and be friend with her. By going through some of her photos online, I thought it may be a good idea to ask her for a photo-shoot. It was a shot in the dark; I sent her a message and just my luck she said “yes”.
We went that weekend to Sylvan Beach Park. My photo-buddy told me about the place and suggested that I should check it out. It was a nice beach, and pretty close by. Unfortunately, it was pretty cloudy. The photos did not turn out as I expected. No matter what, I still had a good time taking the photos.
At the end of the day, I found out that I’m addicted to my camera. I had more fun in taking photos and filming videos than anything else I have been doing recently.
Special thanks to Uyen Le and the lovely “Photography Buddy”
I was very lucky to tag along a Photography class from San Jacinto college. When I came, the professor was setting up all of the lightings and everything looked so professional. My dream day came true? But then, I just found out that I was not allowed to take the photos in the set. That was for the advanced class. I can only take photos of everything around and outside the house, everything but the beautiful models.
I was sitting outside, hating the glooming, gray clouds above me. Then, Tracy (one of the models) walked by. I took the chance, jumped in and hit my camera like crazy. Tracy was really nice and she gave me a chance to take her photos. Although it was like a minute, but those photos made my day.
Hope that everyone have a great day!
A lovely song written and performed by Karina Nistal.
The original idea of using the vintage camera to drive the story was from Roberto Castillo, a friend of mine from school.
By spending a great time to storyboard and plan out the video clip, we were able to shoot the whole video in one day. Everyone worked really hard. And it took me two weeks to edit the video with my own tight schedule. Finally, I got the video done. Please enjoy the video and give me some comments if you can.
Thanks Thang for helping me and Roberto filming this video!!
The project was brought to us by a friend named Dat. He used to be a staff at VNU-CIE; and currently seeking his master at University of Houston, Clear Lake. CIE-VNU works with many U.S universities to help students like myself have a chance to go study abroad. The school planned to have a 10-Year Anniversary Celebration by the end of March, so they want us to make a video about the relationship between CIE and U.S universities to show at the ceremony. Among those many universities, there are three main universities that the school want us to make the video about: University of Houston – Clear Lake, University of Houston and Oklahoma State University.
The project cost us a month to plan and film. We had to schedule a lot of interviews with former students as well as each school faculty members. In order to have some footage about OSU, we drove to Oklahoma over a weekend and did some interviews on the next Monday. That was a very fun trip. It was really cold outside, but we still had to film the whole school. Luckily, we got to meet some former students at the school to show us around. And we also had a chance to try out a nice local Thai restaurant for lunch.
Big thanks to Long Mai, Thang Le, Dat Tran and many students and faculty members at each school for helping us making the video.
In Fall 2010, I took a video production class at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. The class was a great fun. I learned so much about cinematography and film editing process.
I knew a little bit about Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effect before but nothing about Final Cut Pro at all. As a requirement of the class, we needed to learn how to edit our videos using Final Cut. The more I used Final Cut, the more I loved it. Everything was very simple and straight forward. The performance and the render speed was amazing. If you have a chance to try this software, you should. I’m pretty sure you will fall in love with it.
At the end of the class, we had to work on a group project to make a short film. The professor was open to any cool ideas that we can come up with. I had an idea about a viral video about “texting while driving” for a while. So, I took the chance and presented my idea. Everybody loved it. As a result, I got my group to work on the video.
It took us 1 day to get the ideas together, drew out the story board; another 2 days to film and about a week for me to edit the video and add some music to it. Here is what we got. And remember “Please Don’t Text While You Are Driving!”
Sprite is one of Latin America’s most popular brands, especially among teenagers. The lemon-lime soft drink of the Coca Cola Company has developed a solid attitude bond with teens through its “in your face, honest and no-bullshit” personality.
The brand was looking for :30-second videos. Our objective is to create an enduring brand story under a theme of Brutal Honesty.
At the beginning, we could not really understand the whole meaning of “brutal honesty”. So, no single idea came out at all. My friend and me finally decided to meet up at Starbucks, drank some coffee with the hope that a cool place like Starbucks would definitely help our brain function better. After drinking some hot coffee, things started to get a little bit better. Some simple ideas were formed. We started to make some phone calls to our friends to see their responses to the word “brutal honesty”. One of them gave us a simple example of a “brutal honesty” situation. When you tried on a new shirt and asked your friend how you looked. And you got “You look fat in that shirt!”. That was really “in your face” – brutal honesty. So, we got a better idea about the theme for the video. After 3 hours in Starbucks, we called it a day and went home.
The next day, I went to work with the two words “brutal honesty” circling in my head. My brain kept telling me about a guy trying to impress a girl with something related to Sprite. But still, no cool ideas were found. I then gave up, cleared my head, and focused on my current work – styling a Silverlight application. Then, lunch-time came. I told myself that if I had something good for lunch, I might come up some awesome ideas. I decided to treat myself with some Pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) at a usual Vietnamese restaurant closed to work.
Somethings happened in the restaurant helped me to come up with an idea for the video. As I was enjoying my bowl of hot soup and saw a guy sitting on the other table waiting for his food. He took out his phone and started to send some text messages. What’s special about him was his ability to text really fast. I was impressed. Then, I thought about the video for Sprite. It was meant to be showed to teenagers. And I thought fast texting using phones was a trend among teenagers. So, I put together some thoughts about “texting”, “impressing a girl”, “Sprite” and came up with a pretty cool idea for the video. I picked up the phone, call my friend and discussed about it. He liked it. So, we scheduled to do the filming, hired some local models, and spent some hours editing. This is what we got. Watch the video and see if you like it.
