Viet Mac’s House Mac House Productions Interview and Portrait by daniel Garcia Location images courtesy of MAC House
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but it was too late. The photography bug had already claimed him. With the help of the networking begun in college, he built the video production company that today he is ready to take to the next phase.
iet’s first exposure to photography was as a boy, when his dad would go on flea market and garage sale treks, scouting out and bringing home vintage cameras and photographic equipment. Viet wasn’t thinking much about photography as a career, but he played around with a few cameras from time to time. Later, as a student at Cal Poly, to make some extra cash, he began taking photos of coral and seascapes— combining his interest in marine life with the camera skills he’d learned earlier—and selling the prints at local surf shops. “I was always business-minded and didn’t want rely on my parents’ finances,” he said. The response was positive, encouraging him to press on. Even though he knew nothing about light meters and had only taken one photography class, through friends and connections he was hired to shoot a few events. He went, thinking, “This is great, they pay me to go sit on a nice party bus and eat sushi and drink wine and take photos.” Viet eventually graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in molecular, cellular, and environmental biology,
You’ve had some nice clients for being a really new production company.
It was only a few years. We’ve been really lucky. We shot Steph Curry. We shot Vernon Davis for a fun project for Levi’s. Just being on set with Myth Busters was great—I got to bring up our cameras and rig them on their cars. We’ve been on American Idol. And, tonight, I’m doing stuff with Gap. We’ve been really fortunate, working with these huge companies that I never would have dreamed we’d be able to get as clients. I’m not sure how it all happened, but now they’re calling us and getting us to do all these jobs for them. It’s been really cool. We haven’t done any outreach to anyone yet, and that’s the next phase, I think—reaching out to clients that we really want.
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