Welcome to an interview with Anny Liu, one of the winners of the first-ever Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Awards. Liu, age 17, and a student at Balboa High School in Redwood City, CA, won a Silver Award for Animation. Her project, LOOK, was created in conjunction with her co-author Janice Lee.
Here is the text of E-Learning Queen's interview with Anny Liu.
1. What is your name and what is your Aspire Awards project?
My name is Anny Liu, and my Aspire Awards project is titled "LOOK". It's basically about how a conversation between two friends awakened a bunch of little creatures/spirits that represent the creativity that is put into designing everyday objects.
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| LOOK Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award Silver Award: Animation Janice Lee and Anny Liu, Balboa High School |
2. Please describe your project. What is it? What is the purpose? This project is actually a collaboration with a few friends. We all thought that people usually think of art only in the spectrum of "fine art" and do not see how artistic elements can be found in almost everything around us. We hope to express that with "LOOK," and inspire people to look at the world around them. Using little cute creatures popping out of common objects and such, we tried to do that in a fun and interesting way so the viewers will smile and make their own realizations instead of us preaching to others about our ideals of art.
3. What do you hope that people will learn from your Aspire Awards project? What are your primary goals for the project?
I hope that people will learn to appreciate the work and thought put into making everything around them beautiful. And I wish to show through the video that even mundane things actually are designed by someone. The video doesn't try to enforce any type of thinking to the viewers, but it would be great if it made them happy or inspired them to look at the world with a fresh perspective.
4. What do you hope people will learn from your project and ultimately do?
Just "LOOK" :)
5. Describe the digital aspects of your project -- what kinds of video, audio, and graphics did you create? Where did you display them? Any social media sites? (Facebook, Google sites, Tumblr, Flickr, Orkut, blogs, your school's website, podcast sites, etc.?)
The videos were shot in HD with a flipcam. Since about half of the footage were picked spontaneously around the city and we wanted as much footage as possible to choose from, the camera had to be pretty mobile. The audio was actually a song that was made by Can Nguyen, who makes awesome electronic music and kindly let us use his track in our video. The creatures in the video were created in Adobe Illustrator and then placed into the footage with Adobe After Effects in 3D space, after I did some 3D camera tracking of the footage. It was a bit laborious, but the outcome was pretty neat. We shared the video on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to gain publicity. Thanks to the support of my friends, although "LOOK" was put up on the website many weeks later than the other videos, we still managed to generate a good amount of votes.
3. What do you hope that people will learn from your Aspire Awards project? What are your primary goals for the project?
I hope that people will learn to appreciate the work and thought put into making everything around them beautiful. And I wish to show through the video that even mundane things actually are designed by someone. The video doesn't try to enforce any type of thinking to the viewers, but it would be great if it made them happy or inspired them to look at the world with a fresh perspective.
4. What do you hope people will learn from your project and ultimately do?
Just "LOOK" :)
5. Describe the digital aspects of your project -- what kinds of video, audio, and graphics did you create? Where did you display them? Any social media sites? (Facebook, Google sites, Tumblr, Flickr, Orkut, blogs, your school's website, podcast sites, etc.?)
The videos were shot in HD with a flipcam. Since about half of the footage were picked spontaneously around the city and we wanted as much footage as possible to choose from, the camera had to be pretty mobile. The audio was actually a song that was made by Can Nguyen, who makes awesome electronic music and kindly let us use his track in our video. The creatures in the video were created in Adobe Illustrator and then placed into the footage with Adobe After Effects in 3D space, after I did some 3D camera tracking of the footage. It was a bit laborious, but the outcome was pretty neat. We shared the video on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to gain publicity. Thanks to the support of my friends, although "LOOK" was put up on the website many weeks later than the other videos, we still managed to generate a good amount of votes.
6. How will you use the Aspire experience to do more things? What are your next steps? I learned a lot through the Aspire project, and I will definitely keep in touch with all the amazing people I have met and worked with. My next steps are college and then into the real world, hopefully I will be able to work in a media-related field because I really enjoy the type of work and being with other amazing people who share my interest.
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