Mekong Delta is a huge interesting area in the South of Vietnam, filming in Mekong Delta is reporting stories of people and culture that related to rice field, water, river, fishermen, trees, plants, orchards, fruits, fishes, animal, floating market … that are unique to the delta itself.
Mekong Delta in Vietnam including several provinces: An Giang, Can Tho, Tra Vinh, Vinh Long, Dong Thap, Ben Tre, Bac Lieu, Ca Mau
When filming at different provinces, you can find stories or characteristics that are unique for each province.
Ben Tre is famous with … coconuts, the province is covered in coconuts.
Filming and interviewing coconut farmer and director of coconut factory in Ben Tre
A Client contacted us for a shoot about coconut farming and exporting in Ben Tre.
Job description:
The job includes locking down profiles, filming & interviewing, transcribe interview and send the transcription over.
Client’s tech specs:
Camera: Panasonic S5M2X
Output: 1080p 25FPS
16:9
We suggested Client that we can use FX3 for the same costs and Client agreed.
Equipment list:
- Sony FX3. Fullframe.
- Lens: 16-35. 70_200.
- Ronin rs4 pro. Fullset.
- Wireless sound: 01 set.
- Light: 2 Aputure 200c; 1 bolly.
- Drone: Air 3 DJI
After discussing the filming content and costs with Client, we started contacting coconut/ fruit exporting companies and finding farmers for the filming.
Challenges
- It’s very difficult to find contacts of farmers, as there is no contact information of them online.
- When contacting companies, some of them refused filming, some others asked for a lot of information to present to their boss and never answered.
Solutions & Results
Luckily, I was able to contact a company that agreed with filming & interviewing, and also introduced a farmer for us to film with.
Schedule:
- Depart at 4am from HCMC, arrive around 6.30am
- Filming workers starting coming in the factory.
- Travel from factory to coconut farm, filming workers harvesting coconut (they only harvest around 30 mins or less)
- Interviewing a farmer & filming b-rolls of the farmer.
- Come back to the factory filming workers and production
- Interview director & filming b-rolls of the director.
- Filming b-rolls of the company
- Filming loading to truck and truck leaving the factory.
- Filming b-rolls of Ben Tre
Interview questions
Interview questions for a Vietnamese coconut farmer:
- Name, age, occupation
- How long have you been a coconut farmer?
- Why is coconut farming important to you?
- How many coconut farmers are there in the village? Is it an important source of livelihood to the villagers?
- How have coconut farming in this village evolved over the years?
- What makes you get into coconut farming? (Family, generation etc)
- Describe a day of work in coconut farming (challenges)
- How big is your coconut farm?
- How much do you earn a day?
- Where do you sell the coconuts to?
- Who do you sell the coconuts to?
- How did new economic policies help in your business?
- How did coconut exporting help improve your livelihood?
Interview questions for director of a coconut factory in Vietnam
- How many years have you been running/working in fruit export trade?
- What is your export quantity in a year? (Equivalent to …? )
- Describe a day of work of workers?
- What is the process of fruit export?
- What do you have to look out for (e.g. defects)?
- How do you ensure the quality of your exports?
- Where do you ship to?
- Who is your biggest client?
- How often do you ship?
- Are there any trends and patterns in export demand? For example, do certain countries demand more of a specific fruit etc? If so, how do you cope with the demand?
- How did new economic policies affect your daily operations?
- What affects your output? E.g. Climate change, Political conflicts
Transcript / Subtitling from Vietnamese to English interview content
After the shooting day, we need to transcript the interview content from Vietnamese to English for the Client. We usually use software aegisub for that purpose.
Filming of making fried sticky rice ball.
Fried sticky rice ball is an interesting dish that is unique to the Mekong Delta area in Vietnam.
It requires special skills from selecting sticky rice, cooking, beating the rice.
The chef needs to have a lot of strength and fast to be able to make the fried sticky rice round as a ball.
The stove need to be gas stove, it would be harder to make it work with electric stove.
The ball is mostly empty inside and it’s more for artistic purpose.
This is usually eaten with roasted chicken.
We were able to ask a chef from Tien Giang area to make a dish like this for us to film for international television.
