Grant Vu

I’m grateful to have lived in Seattle, a place that’s open and abundant with nature. Last weekend, while taking a walk in Pioneer Square to grab some lunch, I ended up taking a small detour that led me to the ferry docks. Something about looking out at the water always brings me serenity.

You see, I feel highly motivated to work, yet I also tend to get easily distracted. It might sound cliché, but there’s something about gazing out at large bodies of water that helps me concentrate on a particular topic or idea that I struggle to focus on otherwise. Even though the trip to the ocean from Pioneer Square didn’t seem significant initially, once I arrived and took in the surroundings, I found myself fully engaged, able to flesh out ideas for my school projects.

However, it’s not just being in nature that sparks my creativity; it’s specifically the presence of water. There’s a unique quality to its vastness and the way it encompasses everything around it, expanding my field of view and allowing me to think more deeply.

My design uses the standard color palette of the Fire Bird hockey time while also mixing the palette of the festival marketing. It also uses the design of the festival both on the front of the jersey and the festivals font for the player name on the back.

Freelance work gives someone a lot of freedom and flexibility. You get to choose the projects you want to work on, set your own hours, and even work from wherever you like. Work-life balance and gaining experience in different industries are definitely a pro as well. However freelancers have to deal with income fluctuations since workloads and projects can be unpredictable. Plus, they have to handle things like taxes and marketing on their own, and they don’t get employee benefits, so financial planning is important.

Full time is probably the least risky and most comfortable path of the 3 types of employment. Its most notable benefits are probably having a predictable income and comprehensive benefits like health insurance and retirement plans. However, it can negatively affect work life balance due to it having less flexibility and potentially a higher overall workload.

Part time is a good median between Fulltime and Freelance. It lets you pursue personal interests alongside your job and offers flexibility. It is good for work life balance since it allows for lots of time outside of the work you do. However, part-time jobs usually come with limited income and fewer opportunities for advancement.  But, like freelance, it can also allow you to explore or advance your abilities and career in other ways giving the extra time.

As of now, I feel like part time or freelance is the way to go for me. As a student, it would allow me to focus on schooling and give me time off from a full load of work to allow me to explore other things. However, as I advance in my career, full time would probably be what I want to pursue since it allows for the most stability and $$$$.

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Upon hearing that a director from CUT was coming to speak, I was immediately excited since I have been a fan of the CUT youtube channel for a long time. The videos have always not only been humorous, but also very insightful and telling about the people featured, and I think the main reason is the straightforwardness and vulnerability that the prompts entail as well as how willing the guests are to participate in them.

After watching a few more of their videos, I had an idea about an interesting topic that could be used for one; though it may not be as deep cutting as some of their other videos. I was thinking that an individual would have to match somebody’s pet to their owner. Often times, people say that an animal mirrors not only the personality of their owner, but also how they look. I think that the way people would decide whose pet is whose would be pretty funny and insightful from their reasoning.

The way I think it would work best is by having 2 or 3 guessers and about 7-8 pet/owner pairs. The guessers could interact with each of the animals first for a few minutes and then afterwards meet all the owners one by one. From then on, they could make their choices of who is paired up with which pet. 

In general, most of the assignments and projects that I have completed at SCCA were pretty smooth sailing. I am not to say that all things went perfectly, waters have been rough at times, but I have rarely had to nail in wooden planks against rushing waters to keep a project afloat. However, the most daunting setback I have had was for my final last quarter for the Lighting Techniques 1 class.

The final was to produce 2 images in a similar vein, one being a still life and the other being a portrait. They had to be cohesive to one another as if you could see them in the same promotional campaign. My idea for the duplet was something pertaining to a back to school campaign. My portrait was going to be of my younger cousin in hip new kids clothing, kind of like a gap kids splash page on their website. For the still life, I was going to photograph falling cereal in an aesthetically appealing way into a bowl of milk. 

I did my still life shoot first which went through with little to no complications, yet the following day, as I was shopping for kids clothes for my cousin to try on, I received a call from his older brother telling me that “plans” had arisen causing them to not be able to come any more. Upon this news, I realized that my plans for the shoot were foiled almost entirely, the shoot day was that night and I didn’t know any other children nor did I feel comfortable asking any random kids to come with me and take their picture.

I decided to do only option I could go for, which is just use a different person as my model and have them act like a child. Of course the vibe of the final was now going to be completely different, but the shifting tone actually led to something that I really liked and am proud of. The use of Jake acting like a small kid going to school rather than a real child gave a large overarching humor to the whole image which would have been absent if the original proposal had gone through.

I think the simplicity in the shape of fruits, just being oblong circles and spheres, allows them to have an extremely pleasing aesthetic. For this image, I tried to emulate the depiction of fruits by baroque painters, where the fruits are cast in a very soft and warm quality of light. For creating the image itself, I made sure to frame the fruit with a decent amount of negative space around it. For lighting, I used one large strip box to create a daytime window look at the light add flagged off the background and parts of the table to add more depth to the image. I also used a small white card to fill in some of the shadows on the off-key side of the fruit.

There is one mistake that refuses to leave my mind, despite it maybe not being the most disruptive to my work, it sits in my consciousness because it was perhaps the first big oopsie I had done when working for someone else.

At the time, I had just begun doing paid event photography work for some clients. Nothing too much or too high paying, just some deeds for family friends for a few bucks here and there. Gig by gig, I began to just think higher and higher of myself. I was having really difficulty delivering work that clients would really like, and though I spent a lot of time touching up my work, capturing itself at events was never a challenge. However, at the peak of the moment I sat where my ass needed to be thrown off and humbled, just that happened.

My friend’s father owns an event videography and photography company. I had known this for a while and had always been interested in maybe joining him on a gig. So I asked my friend if he could ask his dad if there were any events coming up that I could maybe slide into. 

“I think a photographer dropped from one of the events he’s doing, a wedding or something.” is what he came back to me with. Perfect, I thought to myself, so I emailed his father and offered my hand in ‘sub-contractory’ to him (along with supplemental photos of the 1 wedding I had shot beforehand). 

The wedding went not as planned, I had jumped the gun in what I believed my capability was. It was an absolutely massive party, bigger than any wedding I had been to in my life, and probably at least 10 fold the size of the only one I had previously worked on. Though that wasn’t too big of an issue, it was actually plus in some ways. The biggest nerve racking part for me was the other photographers and videographers there. They were way out of my league in skill and equipment. They swooped in and out of areas capturing left and right with the swiftness of a bird and the speed and stealth of a cat. I stumbled around the crowded hot spots and sheepishly asked to take photos of people. Though my work wasn’t as clean and stellar as the other professionals there, I still managed to get some stuff. But the oopsie came towards the end of the night. There was a big surprise choreographed dance that the bride and the groom were going to perform at in the middle of the giant dance area that the event capturers were notified of before hand. As we  gathered to our discussed between each other spots, the dance began, and quickly a large crowd formed around the 2 of them.

My camera battery died 15 seconds later. I panicked and looked around at the dense wall of bodies that separate me and an extra battery in my camera bag. I forced my way through the crowd, definitely bothering many of them (and being very unlike both a cat and a bird). I came back and the climax of the evening had finished, my sd card empty of the entire moment.

I told the other photographers and they were ensuring me that it didn’t matter, they got great shots and coverage of it. I told my friends father after the event and he told me “it’s fine”. But he never reached out to me again unsurprisingly. My ass got extremely humbled that evening, and it completely changed my routine for event work. Not only do I study hard for what the event may look like, but I triple prepare not only for the full event, but before each moment that may come up too.