The Story of Digital Voice - Vi Chong
Over the fifteen years the organisation has been in existence we’ve collected together a rather wonderful group of people who bring their skills and experience to our projects. Our freelance team is one of the aspects that make Digital Voice stand out from the crowd and as I’ve been writing this series, it’s fascinating to see both the range of skills and how they first encountered the organisation. Their routes to us are all so varied, as I found when I caught up with Villing Chong.
Vi Chong is a Digital Imaging Technician (DIT) for film and TV, having studied Media Production at Northumbria University. She has worked for Netflix, Marvel and Disney and says that her career highlight so far was creating the LUT [lookup tables which enhance the colour and contrast of film footage] for the tv drama ‘A Very British Scandal’.
Easy to see why Vi has been a vital member of the Digital Voice team but her relationship with the organisation actually started way before the qualifications and experience.
“I met Julie at a filmmaking course at the Tyneside Cinema when I was 16. She asked me to volunteer with her project Ultimate Youth and the first project I worked on as a runner was a film project called ‘msg frm Swalwell’, helping young people have their say about what they wanted to change about the area. She supported me to have training as a VJ with professional VJ mentors. I then went on to train as a facilitator with her and Julie started to pay me to help teach other young people to VJ. Then when I was at college, I helped Julie facilitate workshops in VJing, stop motion animation, and music video making. These were run at schools and youth clubs across the North East.
Vi’s work for the organisation includes shooting and editing on our film-making projects, which she really enjoys;
“I was always amazed by how we managed to get whole videos completed in the time that we had. We often worked with disadvantaged people, and I hope they got to feel a sense of accomplishment after we completed our productions together.”
Can she pick a favourite project though?
“I had a great time with all of it but I think Passionate About Media was my favourite. I remember doing the time lapse video of all the Sage being set up and the RTS awards guests coming in was pretty cool. That was when I first met Mike Pentney, one of the mentors, who I still work with today.”
Thanks for being part of the team Vi!
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