VietNamNet Bridge – A Vietnamese-made stop-motion video that won the top award at the worldwide United Nations PLURAL+ Video Festival will be aired on Ho Chi Minh City Television (HTV).

Sharper image: A scene from the Say Hi to Pencil video, which won first prize at the United Nations PLURAL+ Video Festival.
The makers of the video, Huynh Thanh Thanh and Pham Phuong Anh, both 21, are students in the journalism department at the HCM City University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

They have been working round-the-clock for one week to develop their award-winning short video into a series of cartoons.

Each video, which lasts about five minutes, sends an educational message to the audience, according to Thanh and Anh, who began making videos at high school.

The two university students said they learned techniques from watching instructional YouTube videos.

The video's themes come from the UN contest's topics of migration, diversity, identity and integration.

It took the two students nearly three days and nights to finish the award-winning clip for the UN festival. They used 1,000 photos to make the characters move like real humans.

The title, Say Hi to Pencil, tells the story of how a pencil adapts to its life with a family of highlighters that are always trying to kick it out.

Thanh and Anh's first video was The Journey, which won first prize at the nationwide Student Amateur Filmmaking Festival last year. Their other videos that won prizes included When We Fall in Love and Sorry.

The video will be aired at 5.30pm on Monday and Thursday on HTV beginning on July 2.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News