Producer Catherine How (middle) and Director Huong (right) receive their prizes at the prize-giving ceremony held in Beijing with Judge and Dean of the Audio-Visual School of Shanxi Media Institute, Jia Yue (left).

A student production team, 8seventeen Productions, from TAR UMT won third place in the student category of the SunStrong Scam Prevention Short Film Contest on 17 June 2023. The Scam Prevention Short Film Contest is an event co-organised by Malaysia's SunStrong Entertainment and China's Horizon Corporate Volunteer Consultancy (HCVC). The contest was made to create awareness about scam crimes, their impact on victims, and how to prevent them.

The film the students produced and directed is titled “Sink”, and film producer Catherine How Xin Yuen and film director Huong Tai Yu represented the team to receive the award in Beijing, China.

“Sink" is about a man who receives a phone call from a friend offering to work in a casino in Thailand with a high salary. He accepts the offer, but when he arrives in Thailand, he realises that it was  a scam. He is forced to work in a call centre and is abused when he does not meet his quotas. The film ends with the man actually having the whole scenario playing in his mind while still on the phone with his friend as he rejects the offer.

Director Huong's inspiration for the film came from his research on a Taiwanese YouTube channel named Bump. “I was watching a video of Bump going around Cambodia and interviewing different scam victims. The horrible ordeals the victims went through were heartbreaking, and I also saw this as a great opportunity to use my skills and knowledge to create awareness about this ongoing social problem through this film,” Huong shared.

8seventeen Productions consists of multimedia design and broadcasting students. The team faced a number of challenges to ensure that their film would be of top quality.  “It was a challenge for the team when we decided to enhance certain scenes of the film in a “Camcorder” style to provide a more intense first person perspective for the audiences, but we were very happy for the amazing end results of our hard work,” Catherine How enthused.

The student production team, 8seventeen Production, consists of both broadcasting and multimedia design students.