Floating to Freedom
Senior Honors Thesis & Documentary Short Film ©2022
“Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Film” Award at UConn Senior BFA Exhibition in April 2022
Floating to Freedom is a documentary short film in which Hai Do, my uncle and a survivor and refugee of the fall of Saigon at the age of 17, recounts his experiences growing up in Vietnam during the war, fleeing the country, and starting a new life in America.
I have always been interested in sociology and human rights, and over my career at UConn a few courses were transformative in my work. My sophomore year I took a course with my project advisor, Professor Catherine Masud, that first formally introduced me to the documentary genre and its conventions. I became obsessed with the idea of truth and communicating that in my work. My next course with Professor Masud focused more on documentary for human rights, but also on the role of archival materials in documentary creation. We created a group documentary focused on a member of the U.S. prosecution team for the Nuremberg trials, and his letters sent home to his wife during this time — see “Letters from Nuremberg” under the Documentary tab. This gave me experience working in primary sources and seeing their power in impactful storytelling. It also opened my eyes to history and its importance in informing the present, especially pertaining to modern day human rights issues.
I left this class knowing that I wanted to create a documentary surrounding human rights issues, but one that had a personal tie to me that would allow it to be really meaningful. Furthermore, I knew that this genre that combines many media forms into a film is often lacking in animated content, which I also studied during my career at UConn. Therefore, it was important to me to bring some animation into my project and explore how animation can represent truth — in ways sometimes archival can’t. The result is this film, combining archival material, animation, human rights, and an exploration of my family history.
Creative Process
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Conducting Interviews
I began by researching Saigon and the Vietnam War, as well as reading a newspaper article written by Do about his experience. I used this information to create meaningful questions and interviewed Do multiple times. We began with a pre-interview conducted over Zoom for me to get an idea of the content. I used this to solidify my questions and then traveled to his home to film the in-person interview footage seen in the documentary.
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Building a Script
I then transcribed my interviews with Do and started reading through the transcripts. Between both interviews I had about 3 hours of audio to comb through, and I started identifying the most powerful and most important parts of his story. I used the quotes I had flagged to string together a narrative, with a clear and meaningful story arc. This script was then used to create a Premiere timeline containing only the audio.
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Sourcing Archival
Based off of the content of my script I began to search numerous archival sources for photographs, archival footage, radio broadcasts, newspaper headlines, etc. that would aid in the telling of the story. I then worked the various media into the Premiere timeline and went through multiple editing passes.
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Adding Animation
I identified a few scenes in the narrative that were more abstract and would benefit from an artistic representation as opposed to archival footage, such as the scene depicting Do’s nightmares of hollow eyes or when his father drops a gun into Subic Bay. For these scenes I hand drew images frame by frame using a lightbox, and strung these frames together into nested sequences in Premiere to create a stop-motion animated effect.