Mở Chương - RMIT

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cập nhật: 2022-01-25

After school time in UK in 2011, I decided I was going to be a musician. I worked at Đô-rê-mi after awhile and opened up a rehearsal studio serving rock band in Sài Gòn.

The parent can tell that I might not have a future with music and advise me to have a backup plan as in continue with academic study.

I listened and signed up in RMIT for bachelor of Marketing. To be honestly, I signed up because the football pitch in RMIT was really nice. It had been quite some time since I last put on some stud so I didn’t fight back much.

After one term, I changed to a diffirent degree. The reason was a lecturer summed up very precisely what marketing is:

I moved on to Design (Digital Multimedia). The first lecturer I had was Paul Smith. In the very first class, I realized that in front of me was a very wise man with tons of experience in creative work. I didn’t dare to ask about his history but I don’t think it matter much with how much I was learning from him. There are two story with Paul that I would love to save…

<<< 1 >>>

The first story was when I was in Time Base class with Paul. Our team needed a room to record the footages. We contact the front office to book a room but we just could not get one for no apparent reason. I tell Nhân (teammate) perhaps if we ask Paul for help, may be we would have a chance to get this thing done.

After absorbing what was going on, Paul flipped out and scolled the all front office staff. At this time I can see that he is not very well and had trouble breathing. I was very afraid he would collapse in front of me so I keep telling to forget about it coz it’s just a student film. I didn’t know anything about his health or private life but I insisted to exchange phone numbers coz I didn’t want this bold man with big his fat belly would just go home and collapse latter on his own.

Early in 2017, I got the news that Paul passed away. I left a couple of words on his facebook page together with a picture I took in class.

<<< 2 >>>

The second story was when I was in a diffirent class with Paul. I don’t remember the name of the class. May be it was time experience or somthing. I didn’t save the finish film either. At this time I was already quite busy working at Digipost and so I did the assignment for Paul with not much care. All I did was sticking a GoPro on to a motorcycle wheel and ride around the block. I didn’t spend much time cutting the film either. When I present the film in class Paul said this to me:

At that very moment, I realized that filmmaking is just like building a magic trick - the whole show is build for the moment of revelation. I frozed for a bit before thanking him trying to resist smiling.

After that day I thought a lot about that little sentence. Until it suddenly hit me that was a very simple and effective fomular to approach every creative work.

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TR000 - Sydney Travel - 07/2015

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cập nhật: 2022-01-23

This was not the first film that I cut. But I was the first film that I cut with a serious attitude. This was a an assignment for Khoa (I don’t remember which class this was). Student was to cut footage that Khoa gathered from a trip visiting Sydney. The first thing I noticed was that there was no music with all the material that we recieved.

At that time I was still dreaming about becoming a musician. So naturally, I produced a music piece for the film. The song name is [Sea Sea][].

I don’t remember what grade I got but I started to focus on watching film more. While I was watching films that I already had in the hard drive, I realized that F for Fake was a classic masterpiece by Orson Wells. Before that point, all silly me thought was that he was just a magician. Then I found the George Mèliés stuff. Much time later, when I research about the origin of cinema and learned that I was on a very similar path to these pioneers of this art. This is a very cheesy fact that I have no power to change.

This project marked the beginning for my curiousity of the illusions, emotions and concepts that cinema can create.

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Credit

published: 2015-07-??

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/Lecturer/Cameraman/

• Nguyễn Trọng Khoa

/Editor/Music/

• Trung

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