Hieu Vu makes things move for a living, and the list of people who’ve asked him to do it is genuinely impressive: Adobe, Google, Dell, Audible, MLB, Slack, Intel, Call of Duty League. He has worked on Adobe Max campaigns, Google marketing keynotes and music videos for Vietnamese artists GDucky and Masew. His work combines illustrative design visuals with music to arouse curiosity, wonderment and, sometimes, nostalgia. In his spare time he runs a YouTube channel dedicated to motion design education, which the After Effects community has declared “criminally underrated.”
At Kinomural, his film Tension closes the festival, screening simultaneously on all walls.
Unease has a shape. In Tension, it shifts, collides and repositions itself in ways that are barely perceptible but impossible to ignore. A motion graphics study in transitions and unexpected platforms, the work grew out of a turbulent summer marked by personal and traumatic experiences: Hieu Vu’s attempt to translate those feelings directly into pixels, not to explain them, but to make you feel them. The soundtrack is Masquerade by British classical composer Thomas Farnon, from his 2019 album Reverie.
