If you haven’t done so already, do yourself a favour and watch a Hinny Tran film. Leave the pages of this magazine and watch just one, but know that when you watch just one of his films, you will be immediately craving the second, then the third, and fourth. Hinny is a Creative Director, a pop artist entrepreneur, and his work with fashion films is entrancing, engrossing and confronting, to say the least, and I can never seem to stop at just one. Alongside an incredibly talented and artistically connected team of production artists, Hinny is also the Co-Creative Director of the annual event, Fred Hates Fashion. I am not exaggerating when I reference the power of his films, and I’m also not shy about the fact that I may be Hinny Tran’s biggest fan. But, when something in the fashion world moves me, it deserves a noble mention. There is a certain depth and darkness to his films, and the way in which he achieves an intellectual conversation on a visual level, impresses me beyond belief. The word ‘fashion’ is somewhat tarnished: glossy magazines, bright lights, supermodels, bling bling, need, want, trends, but Hinny’s work surpasses the singular idea that fashion is ‘an item’, and instead, his films convey a dialogue of purpose and substance. In his films for designer clients, clothes are not just clothes; they are a physical amalgamation of a non-tangible concept, of which each designer has their own. Hinny’s films respect this individuality and through intricate details, he personifies ‘fashion’, telling a tale of each garment’s purpose and connection to both the designer and the wearer. And, like most minds that possess this unique sense of vision, Hinny developed his through necessity. Growing up in a government flat in Fitzroy with a mother who worked in the entertainment industry and was rarely around, Hinny was accustomed to adolescent delinquencies. He was forced to create his own childhood and spent a lot of his time in after-school care facilities like the Fitzroy Youth Music Program. It was here that Hinny developed his love of the creative, learning everything from chromatic scales to blues improvisation and composition. He also spent a lot of time at ‘Cubbies’, a local adventure playground where he would build and re-build his own dream cubby house (albeit with splintered wood and rusty nails), and the experience opened Hinny’s mind to magic. “The volunteers who ran the place were real characters and they were usually pretty strange and loose. One of the workers, Marianne, was a six-foot tall woman with red hair who had convinced me that I could meditate and send messages with my mind. I spent a lot of my childhood hours meditating and imagining magic.” And although he was in and out of foster homes regularly, he was the popular kid at school that had charisma. He spoke at school assembly, he won awards, he got good grades and he lost sleep over art and science projects. But, he was also the kid that was prescribed Xanax, got caught smoking, got into fights, and who drank whiskey at mass. Needless to say he was expelled, more than once. “I lived double lives from an early age
and I was pretty good at being genuine to them. I was loud; I wanted attention and I was good at getting it. I was expelled from three different schools and when I would enroll myself in a new one, I would create an elaborate story for the principle that my parents couldn't be present to sign the enrolment forms because they were holidaying overseas.” It wasn’t until he had well and truly navigated the complexities of his childhood, that there came a day to define him. “I was 22. My sister left a video camera in my room one day and I picked it up and played around with it. I made a video of myself getting dressed in about 30 different outfits to Kesha’s song, ‘Tick-Tock’. It was a summary of what my morning routine was like at a time when life was fun, and all you had to care about was what you were going to wear and what blogs you were going to read.” When Hinny uploaded his jovial half-naked homemade video to Facebook and YouTube, he got an incredible reaction, so much so that the video was embedded on a Thai pornographic website. He learnt two things about himself at that time: people would pay lots of attention to his films, and, it was the only thing that satisfied all of his creative desires and didn't box him into a single discipline. With this realisation, Hinny quit his business degree in the last semester before graduating. And although he had grown up videoing every day things on his phone, recording footage of memories and seemingly insignificant things, the idea of film as a profession wasn’t something he was always fond of. “I failed film subjects at Latrobe University and I couldn't stand it. I hated film class. I hated the posh talk, the overanalyzing, biased sympathizing sessions and the assumptions that filmmakers always knew what they were doing. It's not that I didn't care enough, it's because I hate the ‘all talk, no action’ approach. I was arrogant, but university hadn't provided the space that I needed to interact.” The way in which Hinny opposed institutional expectations and came to embrace his passion on his own, is one of the most intriguing facts about him. It is also one of the most inspiring, because it’s a problem that many creatives face and they often don’t feel the validity of a self-taught path. “Learning about which button did what never started on the camera or keyboard. For me, the buttons are my behaviours. Turning my interests into film was just about using what I had, whether that was a camera phone, a handy cam or iMovie on my Apple MacBook. I see something first and worry about the technology later.” After finding his confidence with creative expression through film, things moved very quickly for Hinny, and he made his first solo project, BODYMOD, in 2014. The short sci-fi psycho-trip fashion film was purely creative and with no commercial gains to consider, Hinny let loose. The film is confronting and it suggests some very poignant philosophies about the way in which fashion engages the outer-self physically, and the inner-self emotionally. It follows the journey of three contestants (aptly called ‘Trendoids’) who undergo an intense series of test modules that require 8