Around the World...Sorta
At the end of 2019, I quit my job as a paid social supervisor in NYC and took 2 years to backpack around the world. With big plans to travel Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America, I took to capturing my journey with videos by country and syncing those bottled memories with songs from those places.
5 months into my around the world trip, I found myself stranded in Thailand at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic and was there for 6 months, from an originally planned 3 weeks. During that very strict lockdown, I decided to pivot my carefree adventure lifestyle to a very intentional retraining opportunity and taught myself 2D and 3D animation from Youtube videos.
I always knew I wanted to do something creative when I quit my job, but it wasn't until I met a traveling freelance motion graphics designer on my journey prior to lock down, that I realized this career was my calling.
From giving myself personal projects to creating a reel of personal, volunteer and freelance work, and working full-time as a motion graphics designer and editor, this part of my identity has been so intertwined with my passion for travel and adventure. Because of this, I wanted to share these video logs.
These 3 videos were significant in the shaping of my who I am today and a deep reflection of my life at the time. Although I have other videos from my travel journeys, I thought these were the most compelling parts of me.
Thailand
This video music log chronicles my feeling at the time of the March 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic: a juxtaposition between carefree backpacking adventure and inescapable apocalyptic lockdown. After making this video, I began my independent studies as a motion graphics designer.
Philippines
Being half Filipino, I aimed to front load my trip with a thorough exploration through my mother's country of birth. I learned to dive and saw the rare thresher shark, woke up to the sounds of rooster calls (in a not so charming way), and for the first-time, met some of my extended family that lived in Cebu.
Argentina
Argentina was the first place I traveled to with my partner, after moving to LA and temporarily finishing our around the world trip. Patagonia, specifically, was high on my bucket list. We weren't able go when we had originally planned, due to travel restrictions. But we eventually made it and I was challenged with my first multi-day hike (5 days) on the Huemul Circuit--the most exhausted I'd ever been in my life.