I’m a Vietnamese director and I love to create fun weird pretty things that make emotions happen. I started in the movie trailer industry, teach Esoteric Symbolism for fun and have a cat named Bing Bong.
TV SPOT: IMPOSSIBLE REAPER
REEL: BALLS + HEART
SHORT FILM: LOVE
SHORT FILM: HUMANS BE LIKE…
MUSIC VIDEO: DREDG - THE THOUGHT OF LOSING YOU
Client: Universal Music
The goal: tell a simple story with big heart. How? By using patterns of camera movement, surreal spectacle and great acting to make us FEEL what our protagonist was going through in his little hero’s journey. I wanted to make something that would squeeze out maximum emotion juice in a minimal amount of time. Mixing the fantastic with the mundane, in service of a simple story, is potent technique.
AD: HALLOWEEN KILLS - FACE THE SHAPE SHORT FILM
Clients: Universal Studios + Blumhouse + NR8R
This outside-the-box marketing piece for the latest Halloween film required a synthesis of 4 different clients (Universal, Blumhouse, the IP owner and the ad agency) and the delicate handling of a beloved horror brand. We only had a few hours on the Universal Backlot to pull it off and the nearby Jaws ride made things trickier as we would have to stop for robot shark induced explosions every 10minutes. We had to keep our team small (#Covid) so, to avoid additional hires, I volunteered to get killed as well.
SHORT FILM: THE FORGE
A stranger emailed me one day: he was a fan of my work and had money to fund whatever I wanted to make! Upon further inspection, I learned of the tragic reason I was being offered this: his sister had succumbed to suicide and as a final gift, left him money and a request to make art with it.
I decided I had to make something that both honored her and also served as a message for those who are hurting: Good can come from Bad. I teamed up with Rainn Wilson’s production company Soul Pancake (now PARTICIPANT MEDIA) to release it. It was a Vimeo Staff Pick, won Best Action Film at The Hollyshorts Film Festival, got me featured in SHOOT! Magazine’s New Director showcase and most goosebumpingly, resulted in two different people telling me this short film convinced them not to end their own lives.
INTERVIEW: NERDIST
NERDIST invited me to break down the logistics, creativity and psychology of a very challenging type of filmmaking: CREATIVE ACTION STUFF.
COMMERCIAL: LONELY GUY
Client: Zerofriends
Our client, an egdy apparel company famous for work with big emo rock bands, had a wonderful grasp of what their customers respond well to: edgy, artistic and emotionally-charged content that mixes heartfelt humanity with fantastical elements. I decided that a fake documentary exploring alienation and loneliness was a great way to connect with the brand’s fans. I wrote a tragically human monolog and aimed the style towards a bleak mood to compliment the amazing actor’s performance. The spot went over well with both the client and the customers.
TV SPOT: STAR TREK - INTO BLOCKNESS
Client: Bad Robot + Hasbro + Paramount
JJ Abrams had an idea to both promote his new movie and sell its toys: Make a fun short film out of the Legos themselves, for this is the ultimate imagination fodder of every little kid, right? The problem: When he asked me to make this, I did not know how to stop motion animate. So, I forced myself to learn and luckily, it all clicked (clicked… get it? Legos? …) just in time. I spent months at Bad Robot making these things come to life (along with the CG wizardry of Industrial Light and Magic). Paramount bought entire commercial-break blocks to air this for the weeks leading up to the release of the film. It was a bold strategy to drop an entire short film as a nationally broadcast commercial, but it paid off!
COMMERCIAL CAMPAIGN: SHOW ME YOUR MUMU
The clients wanted a tone that portrayed the brand’s Boho Chic identity. I decided the answer was to be a little artsy and a little silly across all categories. We grabbed a jungle location, hired a parrot and, as a technique to keep things authentically fun, I set up little scenarios for our models to play in and filmed it.
SHORT FILM: THE MAN FROM DEATH
Client: Baby Under The Moon Productions - Proof-of-Concept for a TV Series
The Man From Death aimed to be a “Charlie’s Angels” type TV show, except Charlie is an abstract fortune telling list that only makes sense after our heroes accomplish it’s weird, dangerous goals. This was a proof-of-concept piece to get it kicked off with a major studio. While Netflix didn’t run with it, it did win a Vimeo Staff Pick, played at Fantastic Fest, was selected as a Short of the Week, was nominated for Best Action Film at the Hollyshorts film fest and played at about a dozen festivals around the world.
VIRAL AD: THE WINTER STALKER
Client: Zerofriends
These clients make really cute, macabre apparel (often seen in Hot Topic type stores) and thus I was tasked with making a scary and stylistic horror short with an adorable twist. I felt the piece needed some stylistic “punctuation marks,” so I built a giant pencil and strapped a crash test camera to a ceiling fan in order to pull off some special money shots. It worked, the spot went viral and perhaps we destroyed the childhood memories of people everywhere.
VIRAL AD: THE LIFE-CYCLE OF A GOOD IDEA
Client: Juxtapoz Magaine
Juxtapoz Magazine hired me to make a short film that their readers (who are generally all struggling, passionate artists) could deeply relate to. What’s the common factor all creative people know all too well? It is that CREATION HURTS. But also, it’s fun and rewarding. And so, we landed on this metaphorically violent, quirky little expression of what it really feels like to make something you deeply care about. It was important that the emotional suffering of creation was portrayed visually, but equally so, a silly light hearted tone was important to balance it out. A few months after completing this project, they featured me in a multi-page article in the physical magazine. That was nice of them.
SHORT FILM: RELATIONSHIPS BE LIKE - Episode 1
I wanted to express, as simply as possible, the dumbass cycle we humans keep repeating over and over and over. I figure, hey, if we can witness it, we can work on it. Maybe? Californication actress Maddie Zima was down to join this + a few other films in this series that explores our horrible silliness as a species. This will (likely) be in an art show next year, looping 24/7 for a few months.
SHORT FILM: RELATIONSHIPS BE LIKE - Episode 2
Sometimes the person we’re texting just isn’t the person we should be texting. What does that feel like? The goal here was to make people fill this absurd scenario with their own personal experiences and emotions. What do YOU see? P.S. Blue-haired Kali here hired me to make a music video for her band. As part of the payment for said music video, I told her she had to set-dec and star in my little short film. She said yes and here we are.
SHORT FILM: RELATIONSHIPS BE LIKE - EPISODE 3
Metaphor is a powerful tool! We can show a quick surreal scenario and go- THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT IT’S LIKE! The goal here is to let audiences project their own meaning onto this common scenario. Some folks said this short film is the story of Covid! Others say it reminds them of their failed marriage. Another said this is a story of trying to help an addict. Metaphor is powerful! And best of all, it let’s audiences do all the writing, secretly, in their own heads ;)
TV SHOW INTRO: UNDERCOVERS
Client: Bad Robot / NBC
JJ Abrams asked me to cook up a bunch of ideas to be the opening sequence of his new TV show. After landing on this (weirdly enough, because I thought the spinning spaceship from CONTACT would look cool as a wedding ring), we had VFX God Andrew Kramer (of Video Co-Pilot) render it in CG.
SHORT FILM: MUSHROOM KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Client: The Perry Bible Fellowship (made with Nick Gurewitch)
Perry Bible Fellowship creator Nick Gurewitch hired me to direct and animate this piece which was part of a promotion for his popular new book. We experimented with a very interesting comedy gimmick here. Bonus: It’s filled with dozens of special easter eggs which fans diligently hunted for and listed there in the YouTube comments.
MUSIC VIDEO: Cage - Merry Mithras
POLITICAL PSA: ALIENS VS PREDATOR
Client: Zerofriends
A few years ago, some really weird government-mandated racial profiling stuff was going on in Arizona. While filming a different commercial, my client mentioned his company was down to donate to the MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund), a charity fighting the racial inequality yuckiness. Excited, I wrote up this wacky but meaningful satirical idea, shot it 2 days later and, hooray, we raised some good money with this insane little PSA. We fought absurdity with absurdity… absurdly.
UNDERCUT (Student Film - MTV Movie Award Nominee)
My love of Jackie Chan action + my ethical confusion over outsourcing resulted in this Ninja Political Satire. It was nominated for an MTV Movie Award, inspiring me to hit the internet hard with creative ways of getting votes. It worked TOO WELL. I ended up getting so many votes that MTV accused me of cheating, disqualifying me from the award. Alas, the top movie marketing ad agency at the time, The Ant Farm, was paying attention. They liked what I did so much they gave me a job cutting trailers and producing campaigns. I went from cleaning chemical sewers at a metal shop to watching my movie trailers in a packed theatre in a single month and it’s been crazy ever since.