Hi! I’m Vic Grzesiuk. Currently I’m studying Cinema and Media Studies/ Psychology at the University of Southern California.

I first began my relationship with media through photography.

I would spend hours watching my dad and brother take photos of planes flying over our heads at the Chicago O’hare International Airport. When I held the camera, my eye was drawn to rhythm of athletics and hustle of the streets.

I didn’t know I wanted to pursue a film degree until very late in high school. I applied to media studies programs because I had spent majority of the Covid-19 pandemic watching any movie I could find on Netflix. Sitting down in a dark room,

the only light source there of the of production company logos and actors’ faces I didn’t even recognize became my favorite hobby and was the easiest way to kill a couples hours on my own. Some of my early watches included:

Obviously not the greatest bunch of films, but it was enough to get me invested in storytelling and moving images. I appreciated movies for their cinematography and loved when a movie was able to make me feel something through the story and visuals elements combined. My favorite genres quickly emerged as horror, thriller, drama, and sci-fi. This selection, also, was probably influenced in my simultaneous budding interest of psychology (which really picked up in my senior year of high school).

Movies, especially through Netflix (one of the only streaming platforms I had at the time), became easily accessible during the lockdown, and in fact, every generation simply experienced an increase in media consumption during the pandemic.

So from then on, I always held a special interest for movies and when it came time to apply for colleges I said, why not try cinema? I didn’t have any films of my own, but I knew media studies was as adjacent to filmmaking as I could get. Besides, I thought, why not learn about filmmaking’s history to give myself a better foundation before starting on something so foreign to me.

And after a few months of grueling waiting, I accumulated several rejection letters concluded with a very, very surprising acceptance from the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. A few weeks later, I visited Los Angeles for the first time.

I had never felt anything like it.

I saw my first soundstage during a campus tour. I couldn’t stop looking around and admiring the “behind the scenes” of filmmaking. It was like I had stepped behind the curtain of one of the films I had watched during the pandemic, revealing a world of lighting, booms, actors, and more. I was immediately addicted to learning more.

  • Graduation!
  • Chicago
  • Santa Monica

I graduated and worked some photography gigs in Chicago over the summer before starting school in the fall.

Since then, I’ve grown a deep, sincere appreciation for film, and it has motivated me to start creating my own moving pictures now. Currently I have been exploring cinematography, sound design, and stop motion animation, all of which you can explore here!