Vietnamese Production Company Runs the Video Gamut : Cable: Husband-wife refugee team has filmed everything from MTV-type musical videos to a prize-winning documentary on the boat people.

LOS ALAMITOS —  On one video screen, a childlike young woman dances through a field, warbling in Vietnamese to the tune of “Love Is Blue” while cradling a flower. On another, a singer who calls herself Trizzie belts out a pulsing “I Will Survive” in English while wearing a teasingly transparent black net outfit that looks as if it might have been borrowed from Cher’s wardrobe.

“I showed that (outfit) to my mother and she nearly went into shock,” says Trang Nguyen, of DXT Television Productions, with a laugh. “She’s so conservative.”

Music videos by young immigrants living out their MTV-fed Pop Life fantasies are one example of what Nguyen sees as the accelerating assimilation of Orange County’s large Vietnamese community. The DXT-produced videos, with their limited market, are not likely to produce any stars, but they are seen on local Vietnamese-language television programs and in nightclubs.

The videos are the frivolous flip side of more serious work DXT has done on the Vietnamese community, most notably a 1986 documentary, “Rescue on the South China Sea,” which followed efforts by volunteers to rescue 550 Vietnamese refugees on the open sea.

Nguyen, 28, came to the United States from Vietnam with her family at age 13. She handles the administrative side of DXT while her husband, John Dinh Xuan Thai--who escaped Vietnam in 1979 as a boat person--takes care of the technical side of the business.

Thai, 33, started the business 4 1/2 years ago, doing single-camera wedding videos and the like. Today, the growing company does broadcast and cable television commercials for local businesses and is set to move in March into expanded quarters with new, state-of-the-art editing equipment.

With the move comes plans to do more work with the Vietnamese community, which has been a relatively small part of the business to date. In addition to music videos and commercials for Vietnamese businesses, projects include a 1988 trip to the Vatican to document the canonization of 147 Vietnamese martyrs and live coverage of the Vietnamese Catholic Convention last July at Santa Ana Stadium.

But DXT has gotten its biggest exposure through “Rescue on the South China Sea,” which won an Orange County Cable Assn. award and was nominated for an ACE award and a Los Angeles-area Emmy. The project was produced in cooperation with the Boat People SOS Committee in San Diego.

Now, DXT is beginning to plan its next documentary on the continuing story of the boat people, many of whom continue to cram tiny crafts and risk drowning, dehydration, starvation and piracy in a desperate grab for freedom, even as earlier escapees are being sent back to Vietnam--some forcibly, some voluntarily--from Hong Kong refugee camps.

It is a problem near to the heart of Thai. His own story is harrowing, but in the end he was one of the lucky ones.

He and his brother first tried to escape in 1978 as part of a group of 70 people on two fishing boats. When one of the boats proved unseaworthy, all 70 people tried to make it on one boat. But the load was too great; Thai and his brother were part of a group of 10 that was left behind on an uninhabited island off the coast of Cambodia.

There they lived for 2 1/2 days, without food or water, before being spotted by fishermen who reported them to Communist authorities in Vietnam. They were captured, and Thai spent two months in a labor camp before his parents managed to pay his way out. He returned to Ho Chi Minh City, but remained in hiding to avoid military conscription.

The 60 refugees with whom he tried to escape were never heard from again, and presumably perished at sea.

He tried to escape again, this time successfully, in 1979. Thai says the group took off with no clear idea of where to go, mostly because they did not expect to survive the journey. But after seven days they arrived in Thailand, where Thai spent seven months in a refugee camp before coming to the United States. They encountered no piracy, one of the biggest threats to the boat people.

“We were just lucky,” he says. “I don’t know why.”

As one possible subject for their next documentary, Thai and Nguyen have explored the possibility of interviewing the people in Hong Kong refugee camps, many of whom have lived there for years--children born there, some of them now 4 and 5 years old, have never known life outside the fences. But media access to the camps is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. (Thai has edited one documentary, “Freedom or Death,” made up of home videos shot in the camps and smuggled out. But it was produced as an informational video for the Boat People SOS Committee and has not been shown publicly.)

Another possibility is to travel to a Philippine refugee camp to interview the survivors of one tragic and notorious escape attempt. In 1988, 110 refugees took to sea. After 18 days adrift, they encountered the U.S. amphibious transport Dubuque, which gave the party food, water and directions to the nearest land but did not rescue them.

They drifted for another 19 days before being rescued by Filipino fishermen, but by then only 52 were still alive. Survivors told tales of cannibalism. The captain of the Dubuque, Alexander G. Balian, was court-martialed and ultimately reprimanded for dereliction of duty for not rescuing the refugees.

Thai discovered by reading an article in The Times that a cousin, Dinh Thuong Hai, was aboard the craft. He survived but remains in a refugee camp with no immediate hopes of release, despite efforts by Thai to bring him to the United States.

No matter the specific subject, telling the story from the viewpoint of the boat people themselves is the priority. DXT, Nguyen says, has “the ability and the equipment to tell the story in the media, and we really haven’t been doing it. . . . Mainly, I just want to get the American people aware of the problem.”

Nguyen and Thai have friends who survived rape and robbery by pirates in their bids for freedom--and would do it all again. “People are willing to risk everything,” Nguyen says. “That word freedom --It means so much.”