Week 10: The christmas special

Sadly, the silly season doesn't get in the way of progress around these parts. And so rather than stuffing myself with copious amounts of food and lying on a beach doing nothing as per tradition back home, my Vietnamese Christmas involved stuffing my camera full of content for this magazine as we finally conducted our magazine photo shoot.

Of course there was some stuffing to be done, it is tradition after all.

We undertook the photo shoot at a high school in central Ho chi minh city however we soon found that the pharmacy college across the road was a far better option for the settings we required.

We would be conducting photo shoots for two sections of the magazine; our feature article and q&a which revolved around a high school student and our light hearted closing article which features the return of Dr Hieu from the podcast.

I don't mean to defame Dr Hieu in anyway but the real life inspiration of the Doctor is a poor comparison to the charismatic character portrayed by Vinh in our photo shoot. In real life the doctor is honestly a bit of a psychology croc and his mental health youtube channel is pretty useless. But Vinh brought a real sense of gravitas to his role as the zany professor.

There's a very distinct shift in tone with the other half of the photo shoot as it tackled some serious issues regarding mental health. Our talent for this section was fantastic and super helpful when it came to following instructions to get the right shots. The crumbly semi abandoned high school backdrop was the perfect setting for the melancholy vibe we were looking to capture. Afterwards I was tasked with the editing process through adobe light room. I took inspiration from the color scheme of the film Schindler's list. A film shot entirely in black and white except for brief moments which show flashes of red.

For us the red is a symbolic theme throughout the magazine as a representation of Vietnamese society, borrowing from the prominent use of red as the official color of Vietnam. In this series of photos the Vietnamese school system hangs from the necks of the students making it difficult to breathe.

Things are coming together. Merry Christmas to all.

-T