The Safety Film is considered one of the hallmarks of Vietnam Airlines compared to other domestic brands. VNA invests and innovates in concept, imagery, and storytelling annually. Do you feel pressured as the art director of a project that has become a brand?

When working on the project, I often joke with everyone in the team, “You are working on a national project”! It’s just a joke, but sometimes, when I look back, I find it very accurate to the responsibility I felt while working on Vietnam Airlines’ safety film projects. I don’t know if I should call it “pressure”, but when you’ve been involved long enough, witnessing the development from a film that only aims to introduce flight safety to becoming a series of films that many people pay attention to, I feel proud and set many expectations for myself to do better and contribute more to the project.

How do you collaborate with the director to ensure the project’s creativity?

The director is the one who sets the overall vision and decides the style, the flow of the film, as well as every detail that happens in the film, while I am responsible for executing those things.

Sometimes, turning ideas into reality can be quite challenging, and we do not always agree easily; there have been disagreements.

Each director has a different personality and artistic thought, so I usually choose to work, dialogue and analyze details very meticulously with the directors from the pre-production stage. My top priority is always to find solutions to problems. With the common goal of the whole team trying to create the best products, once we understand each other, the coordination process is quite smooth.

What is the most challenging aspect for you when making the Safety Films?

The hardest part is being creative while ensuring that all safety, technical and equipment content is clearly and fully conveyed to the audience according to regulations. Each year, the Safety Film changes in terms of artistic and cinematic language, but the requirements for accuracy in flight safety do not change. For example, the Safety Film 2022 used the setting and artistic language of traditional dances of the Vietnamese ethnic groups. We had to carefully calculate to ensure that the dance was seamless and fully demonstrated all the movements in the airline’s safety regulations.

What unforgettable experience do you recall from the process of making Safety Film 2024?

The Safety Film 2024 combined CGI to complete, but within it, there were a few segments we finished 100% by real shooting, using visual techniques to complete scenes directly, such as the segment transforming the words “No Smoking” or the segment with an optical illusion room, making two passengers appear to be of different sizes. These are quite difficult techniques in filmmaking, requiring very precise coordination from many departments to complete. Therefore, whenever we complete difficult scenes, we often celebrate as if the Vietnam national football team scored a goal.