Grant Vu

I always find it really hard to quantify the skills and weaknesses that I find within myself, it being such a gray zone of comparison with no quantifiability. Though breaking these assets into “soft” and “hard” skills definitely allow me to think about the subject and put a direct pointer to what they are for me.

I would say my soft skills are: Adaptability, Conflict Management, Resourcefulness. Regarding adaptability, the final outcomes of projects that I work on often look drastically different than my original ideas or proposals. When going into something new, I often go with a very rough outline. This allows me to not be stuck to one idea and branch out to wherever a project leads. The adaptability also accounts for the second soft skill of “Conflict Management”. I mainly refer to creative differences for this soft skill. Since what I tend to work on is such a collaborative process, it’s bound to have people with different opinions on what is best for the project. When it comes to me having a different mindset regarding what’s best, I avoid antagonizing the opposing party and try to compromise since I do try to see their perspective. Resourcefulness also branches off from adaptability, however, where skill one comes in when willing to split down a separate path, resourcefulness comes into play when I have to go down one path and am not given the easiest materials to do so and finding other methods to lie on the same track.

Hard skills were a lot harder to determine since they seem to be a lot more precise and less subjective. However, the 3 that I feel like I portray the strongest are technology comprehension, sufficient knowledge of editing softwares, and presentation skills. Technology wise, I have always felt pretty literate; I enjoy coding a lot which has helped me through a lot of technical difficulties fixing small bugs for projects I work on. Editing wise, I am mainly proficient in Premiere but I have been forced to use Resolve and Final Cut in the past so I am relatively familiar with those as well. I love presenting things; most people I know don’t, however I just love talking to a crowd, so presentation skills, specifically comfortability, is definitely a strong suit of mine.

Two soft skills I would like to work on are commitment and time management. Commitment to specific ideas is a big issue of mine, I often get excited about a project I want to pursue and then eventually lose passion part way through it. I want to learn how to commit fully to projects to finish them out to the max. Time management is another big issue for me. Though I do complete almost all my work by the deadline, I often find myself crunching last minute to complete it. (Such as this blog post assignment)

A hard skill I would definitely like to improve on, and this maybe a bit to specific, is mastering excel spreadsheets. My mom is an accountant and keeps everything in excel and it seems like such a useful resource to be proficient in that it is definitely up high in my mind of things to learn. Networking is the hard skill I feel I need to improve on, though I don’t think I am uncomfortable meeting new people and engaging in conversation, I feel as though I have difficulty presenting myself in a way that would be beneficial to my career, such as acting more professionally and engaging in topics that can lead to discussion of opportunities. 

I was having a lot of trouble thinking of something to write about for this blog assignment. Not because I didn’t have any aspirations booked up in my mind, but because the door for ideas to get through was clogged with far too much stuff. The main struggle of this blog assignment was picking a project that was not only personal, but also doable and manageable. This led me to forming a project idea relating to the act of documentation in print form, which is something that I’ve always enjoyed doing in the past, such as photographing for newspapers. I was thinking of a way that I could document the occurrences of what happens on this 5th floor, and it brought me to something that I thoroughly enjoyed working on in the past. I want to create a yearbook of a full year of the students, faculty, and life that occurs in the SCCA.

I of course would need a lot of resources to make this happen, specifically working with many other people to get it done. Since there is so much talent on this floor regarding what could make a yearbook great, I am thankfully positive that particular resource won’t be too hard to find. 

Timewise, I don’t think it would be possible to work on it this school year, since we’re already halfway through it. However, if I do decide to pursue this venture the following year, it would definitely be a full year project, though potentially on and off. I would probably find someone else to help me spearhead the full project and then just ask around to see if others want to join alongwith. We would probably have meetings to discuss the layout, design, and timeline/progress of our work in the project.

Moneywise, the only cost would be finding a place to print the books in mind, which would probably be a little expensive since it would be full color, relatively long, and hard cover. 

As a photographer and visual media student, whenever I see the graphic design students or their work out in the hall, I always have the utmost respect for them. Despite us being on the same floor and under the same “creative academy”, our fields have completely different skill sets.

One thing I admire about the graphic design students that I would also like to emulate myself is their extremely sharp focus towards an end goal. Oftentimes when discussing or working with them, they have an extremely clear and thorough idea of what they want their final product to look or feel like. Though of course there is always a trial and error element to all work, the precision they have towards a final concept is always inspiring to see and a great asset to have when working on a team with them. 

The versatility of what graphic designers are learning as well is very admirable. While us as visual media students have a somewhat narrow scope of work, the graphic designers seem to have an expansive catalogue of skill sets to learn. Not to say that us as visual media students don’t have a large skill set, it just appears as though the graphic design students have a diverse curriculum that allows them to branch off into more workspaces.

From my limited work with the neighboring program so far, the way in which they approach tasks creatively always inspires me. Of course all artists have unique visions, but the way in which the graphic design program is able to hone in their artistic vision to follow a prompt or a task while maintaining their creative voice is always great to see. I believe this is why they are in such high demand in the business world, they are able to give a creative edge to industries while keeping the scope of a companies “aesthetic” in line. Oftentimes, more so than most visual media work, the work that they create appeals both to the world of art and the world that makes money.

One of the most inspiring takeaways I have from our graphic design neighbors is the way in which they take inspiration from other pieces of work, and shifting ideas to create their own pieces. Often as a visual media student, I feel like my work isn’t original enough, or my works are too inspired by other works. However, the way graphic designers approach this dilemma is something I myself am trying to do as well.

Though I do not often find myself in conventional leadership spots, I have found myself exhibiting some of the core Amazon Leadership Principles.

I was on the school broadcast news team in high school, where each week one of us was voted to be the core producer of the episode. I often found myself in this position and perhaps at these moments is when I exhibited my best moments of leadership. Insisting on the Highest Standards was a trait that I had whenever managing the news team. Though at times I may have been an asshole about the work that we were doing, I knew that everyone in the class had pride about the work that they were doing and they themselves wanted their best work to go out to the school’s population. I tried to motivate and critique the work of my peers in the room when I had to.

Another core leadership principle I have practiced is Delivering Results. There was always a strict deadline for the news episodes produced each week. Wednesdays at 11:05am there was a time slot in the day where teachers would air the show and we had to have all our prerecorded news stories ready by the night before to have a soft cushion before the airing of the show. When producing the show, timeliness was always my number one objective: getting the show done in time, pushing people when they were slightly lagging behind and taking part and physically involving myself with groups that would need extra help to finish their segments in time. I always thought that an imperfect result is better than no result at all.

Disagreeing and Committing may have been something I partook in too much to be honest. If I felt like something wasn’t working I would be very vocal about it. Though as mentioned above that I may have come off as an asshole at times, I always tried to be more constructive about arguments than destructive over ideas. 

Of the core Amazon Leadership Principles, I would say the “hardest” for me is Be Right, A Lot. I’m an idiot, so I am often wrong. However I try to combat this by attempting to listen to others, I surround myself with people I think are smarter than me so they call me out if I am wrong and I try and understand/hear them out. 

The information-over-audience quadrant graph made me look at the work I create in a different manner than any way else I have viewed art in the past. Though I would like to think of myself as someone who is able to rest in the (0,0) vertice within the graph and be able to translate into any of the other hemispheres, at this current point, the area I want to shift my future focus towards is more towards specific audience, low information density.

I myself have a rather specific taste in most things, so the range of my work follows that as well. As an aspiring filmmaker, I want my work to cater to a group of people that relate to the work, but I still want it to be somewhat accessible to more general audiences. I guess that would put my x-axis point at (3,0).

This is why I believe lower information density is the work I will push myself towards. Though I don’t really believe low or high information density in art is a thing; the scope of the information relies purely on what the person absorbing the work takes in. For me I interpret the y-axis of the graph as how much “effort” is needed to grasp the work. As stated above, I want my work to be accessible and oftentimes the things I enjoy are more laid back experiences. Lower information density will allow the work I create to be able to penetrate more audiences.

Throughout highschool, I was not the most outgoing individual. Though I did make a lot of meaningful connections during that time, I didn’t feel like my impact around the school was too high. Before the start of my senior year of school, I was approached by my economics teacher about a proposition regarding school involvement. Surprisingly, no one had signed up for a position within the ASB leadership team, school vice president.

Upon hearing this news, I wasn’t sure why or what to do with the information she had laid upon me. But Ms. Landau being both an econ teacher and in charge of the school’s ASB program, I realized that she wanted me to help fill in that role. I declined fast and clearly once she had told me about the opportunity as at the time I thought about myself as 100 percent NOT qualified as a person for the spot, alongside the fact that I had no interest in it either. Ms. Landau proceeded to not try and convince or persuade me to change my mind, rather she told me to “sit on it”.

As a few days passed by, though I didn’t feel like I was perfectly up for the task, the thought of being able to contribute to the school and learn to work in a different type of team environment that I had not done in the past intrigued me. I approached Landau a bit later, accepted the offer, and ran uncontested for ASB Vice President.

The following year was quite difficult, more so than exciting. There was a steep learning curve of the way the full ASB system was run, and I was thrust into it rather unsuspectingly. However, though not everything planned was a complete success, the wins throughout the full journey, such as actually finishing setting up school dances or social events with literally minutes to spare before doors open made the stress of the situation completely worth it. I learned skills about planning and teamwork that will forever be in my catalogue of assets, and though I hope to never be an event planner again in my life, I feel blessed to have been given the opportunity. 

My work is a combination of animation, video, and after effects. I filmed myself holding and dancing with my cat initially and used that as a guide for the rotoscoping. I only manually rotoscoped 3 frames and used a software called EBSynth to generate the other frames in the animation. I masked out my cat and the background in the animation so I could keep my cat live action and put whatever background I wanted in the back. Finally I used after effects to make an audio spectrum of the music I was dancing to (Frank Zappa – Montana) and layered it underneath myself dancing in the video.

Here is a link to the full thing: https://youtu.be/eJ-TSmWY0SM

I was definitely as a loss when thinking up of an idea for this project. The software is super fascinating and fun to use, however the ideas that I did potentially think about doing were out of my reach due to the limited started assets given by adobe. My limited design skills also restricted my use of creating custom assets to put into my scene.

The thoughts of holiday cards inspired my to create an interactive version of the common grade school valentine’s gift card. Specifically the ones that wouldn’t give an option to reject an admirer’s advances. the card I ended making in Aero ended up being a series of questions that would follow if the user selected “No” to the valentine’s request in the AR card. These would attempt to deter the user from continuing to decline the date offer, however if the user reached the end of the questions, they would not be able to proceed and would be forced to select yes to the question.

I mainly stuck with this idea because it did not require creating many assets outside of the primary aero software. I also thought it would be pretty entertaining and funny to go through the experience as a user.

When I was in class and learned that this AR poster assignment was our task for the week, I was really excited for it. However, I wasn’t really sure what to make or how to utilize the poster to it’s maximum. I knew that I wanted the viewer to be somewhat subverted by what was being shown once the motion began, so I initially came up with an idea that the poster could be used like a window, where it would initially depict a still road in a window frame and then the street would come to life once the QR Code was scanned. However, I came to realize that the idea wouldn’t really be to interesting to view.

I then came up with a potential idea where the poster would begin as a drawing, and then transition to reality once the animation began. My first thought for the cartoon poster was someone running in a park, but animating a person isn’t the most visually interesting. One thing I always love in animation is when food or drinks are shown, so that’s what I ended up sticking with. A friend and I went to get some boba tea and I thought this would be a perfect moment to capture in the animated poster. I took a video of the moment and decided that would be incorporated in the work.

The video was then used as a reference for the animated portion I made because I am not very good at drawing (I also don’t have a drawing tablet so I had to use my mouse). The transition was probably the hardest part to create, I layered a green mask that wiped across over a blue color matte and keyed each of those colors out to a different layer of the video (animation and live action).

Though it didn’t turn out perfectly or as crisp as I wanted, I’m still very satisfied with the AR poster I created for a a first attempt ever.