Eugene Pak

Hard Skills

1. Resourcefulness: I’m able to come up with ideas, problem-solve and figure out ways to be useful in situation. I feel this way as I’ve lived unconventionally and with little money for most of my life so it’s just something I got used to doing.

2) Adaptability: Similar to above. I’ve been in a lot of stressful and hard situations so it allows me a lot of tolerance in life.

3) Timely: This was ingrained in me through my parents and going to a military college. I don’t like people wasting my time so I try my best not to with others.

Soft skills:

1. Ability to be flexible
2. Calm in face of hard situations
3. Can collaborate with many different types of people

To develop

Hard skills

1. Motion Graphics
   1. Will help me be more competitive when pursue post production 

2) Audio Post processing

1. Will help me in the future of post production

Soft skills

1. Patience
   1.  Being a student is a slow grind and at times feels like there isn’t much progress but the ability to push through and seeing the positives would help me be more patient
2. Organization
   1. I’m not great at being organized which bleeds into my work-life balance, school work and productivity. It would help me be more productive and not waste time.

I wasn’t in class as I had to take my dog to the ER… fun morning. But this Adobe AR app was quite interesting and very intuitive to figure out even though I wasn’t present for the lecture. I was able to do everything on the iOS app and without my difficult. It was cool to do create an AR environment/design without needing to know how to code.

I came up with a “new home” card as a good friend of my just moved into a new place and tried to might their aesthetic, with plants and chaotic energy with mismatched letters. The only problem that I ran into was trying to figure out the path for the interactions of the plants. Ultimately, I wasn’t able to figure it out but I got pretty close to what I wanted just messing with the dials.

-Pak

A personal project that I’m currently working on is a film called Wild United. This is a project that I’ve had in mind before entering the program for my old guiding company here in Seattle. It follows two separate groups of students backpacking in different locations.It involves going to two different locations, one of which was in the Desolation Wilderness in California and one here in the PNW. I shot the first half in California last summer.

My timeline is as follows:

Jan-May 2023: Pre-production, organize footage from Bay Area, logistics with BOLD & GOLD, create trailer with footage already acquired

Jun-August 2023: Ship Royal Robbins product finalize trip selection, Production in WA

August – November 2023: Editing & post-production

December 2023: Share and celebrate!

What I would need to execute the project is to finalize my contract with Royal Robbins and if it doesn’t follow through, work with BOLD & GOLD to find different funding. Also, I would need to find someone (photographer) to come with me on the backpacking trip to get product photos for Royal Robbins. 

Superhot Oculus Quest

Superhot VR is a first-person shooter time is at a standstill until you move then everything moves superfast and the enemies start becoming a threat. Basically, you are a superhuman who can see at slower speeds and who is taking down shooters while you move along a set path, Neo. It requires the player to have two controllers and a headset while tracking their movements.

It is the only video game to this day that made me drip with sweat. I played it at the elite level after I got the hang of it and I was ducking, moving, and dodging rapidly. My adrenaline is pumping right from the start.

The scenarios and campaign are pretty easy but once you try the different difficulty levels it gets very difficult. It is easily the best game I’ve ever played on the VR.

Some things I would change are the enemy locations. They pop up in a set pattern and it would be more interesting with random locations. After you play a level a few times you get the hang of where things will be and the excitement kind of fades. The other criticism that I have is the melee component is quite lacking. There is a weird lag from when you initiate unlike the bullets which do a really good job.

But overall, with the Survival and Campaign modes, I can definitely see myself playing this over and over again especially to work up a sweat indoors in an entertaining way!

Please write about an experience with a project HERE AT THE CREATIVE ACADEMY in which you prepared for your work but then had to pivot to accommodate circumstances that you did not predict. Tell us about the assignment parameters, your plan for the project, how you set about accomplishing it, and what the unforeseen circumstances were that you had to adapt to. Lastly, how did the project turn out, and how did it compare to your original plan.

For our visual media class, we had to shoot a documentary of our own chosen interest. I decided to film a short doc on my friend who runs the Peddling Relief Project, whose mission is food rescue through working with food banks to deliver food to those in most need. So, I setup up a day to do interviews with him. Because of the location and season, there just wasn’t enough natural lighting to shoot it in the office building. So, I decided to find a space outside even though there was a lot of noise.

Initially, I was planning on placing a lav mic on the subject for the primary audio source and use a shotgun mic as the secondary with a camera placed at a different angle. After setting up the lav, I realized that I forgot to insert the small microsd card before leaving so that rendered that useless. And so we went with the shotgun mic. After reviewing my footage, for some reason my shotgun didn’t record at all which was strange since I placed in new batteries. So, I had to use the cameras internal mic as the primary audio source.

Yeah, it wasn’t ideal but I was able to at least get audio for the interview, although it wasn’t the best sound. I was able to tweak and isolate the voice just enough that there wasn’t too much background noise and didn’t sound too hollow. The project turned out fine as I had a really awesome b-roll after shooting for 2 days but man, sometimes things just turn out as planned even with your backup!

I’ve learned a lot about the overlap of film and design working on my own film. I hired several designers –to work on my film poster, chapter titles, and map animation. As I don’t have that skill set myself, it is imperative that designers are the backbone of what goes behind making a film. Without the support of designers, I would be completely lost on how to formulate the aesthetic of my film. It is very essential to collaborate within both worlds. As my partner is a graphic designer, I constantly ask for help with layout, text composition, and animation. After experiencing all of this and finding my focus wanting to be video editing, I truly realize the collision of both worlds. Especially after spending hundreds of hours editing my own film.

Frugality: I would have to say frugality is my theme that overarches my entire life whether that is finances or trying to come up with an idea that costs enormously less time or money. But for a real-life example, I would have to say my current project decided to learn the skills of video editing myself instead of paying someone to do it for my film. I am going to school to learn more about visual media but paying myself, although it is taking a drastically long time is within my control to create what I want for the final product.

Learn and Be Curious: I am the type of person who always wants to be learning and growing within my own career and personal development. Instead of deciding to go to school first, I decided to just invest in myself and learn how to film while being within the project. I tend to learn the most through trial and error and messing up so first-hand experience always seems to work best for me.

Dive Deep: I had to do this trying to become an educator whether that was in the classroom or as a guide. I don’t mind being thrown in the deep end and trying to figure things out on my own. I’ve always been the one to wear a lot of hats and try to find resources and support to make it through. This is also the hardest for me as I suck at asking for help so if I have to dive deep than I tend to lean towards doing it solo.

A time that I said “yes,” despite the circumstances of not being prepared enough or feeling inadequate for the job is when I decided to create a film for the bike trip I’ve been planning for five years to do with my little brother. Honestly, I was tired of the outdoor media industry overlooking underrepresented communities, I never saw a bikepacking film with faces that looked like mine. So, I decided to make my own. I loved making films throughout high school but never considered it as a career path.

I was fully prepared to self-fund my project, spent money on the gear and self-taught the technical skills for a few months before starting on my bike trip. I was determined to make it work. But a month and a half before the trip started, things started to fall into place when I somehow received funding from a major bicycle company and it snowballed from there. I was receiving continuous support after all of the work I’d done to pitch my idea, make a deck and put my work out there, fearlessly. It was a dream come true, I pitched my project to someone I didn’t know and hoped that something would come out of it. All it takes is one.

With the funding, I could hire a friend to join us and be the videographer, support my 17-year-old brother financially and bring other Korean American creatives onto the project. It really became my passion project and I became fully invested in this film dream. Not only did we have a once of a lifetime experience on this 2 month’s bike trip. I have the honor to capture it and share it with the world with my own creative control. Who gets a chance like this, especially for their first film? So, just doing it and saying “yes” manifested all of this.

When I think about my creative career based on the spectrum shared by Joe Hallock, I immediately think about whom I want to impact, not where I aspire to work. For me, I am a “why” person. There has to be a good reason why I’m doing something. If the why doesn’t align with my values or I find it meaningless then I’m not interested. I’ve worked in over 12+ jobs, in different careers and continents searching for this why. Once there is a solid reason why nothing else matters.

Questions like:

-Why am I getting paid so little?

-Why am I doing this for free when I can be getting paid so much more?

-Why did I move across the world for this?

-Why am I living with so little when I can be making more $ with a soulless job?

Go out the window.

If the purpose is there, I am here for it no matter how tiring or dirty the job is/was. Once I find out my why doesn’t align with my purpose, value, or interests I move on. This brings me back to this very corporate-looking diagram, I’d rather be doing work that is purposeful and/or for a good cause for little money than trying to do why-less work for a lot of money. I’ve done this for the past 10 years and have no desire to change/upgrade my minimal lifestyle for purposeless work until different life circumstances need me to.

So, yeah I guess the spectrum doesn’t matter as long as there’s a why. But of course, having creative work that inspires and interests me is always a plus but that’s not my priority.