Good evening. I am creative director Sang Hyun Yoo.
KAIST is my alma mater, so when I was first contacted to speak at TEDxKAIST, I was very worried.
What could I possibly have to say?
Wouldn't it be better to give a talk later, after I have had a bit more success and expanded my portfolio?
When I asked my college classmate for advice, he told me, just show your undergrad GPA to the audience.
he told me, just show your undergrad GPA to the audience.
That will be enough to give them hope.
So I actually will show you my GPA later on in my talk.
Anyways, I had this thought:
I am also still in the process of pondering about what path I should take in my life,
and worrying about whether I'm traveling In the right direction.
I am sure many of you here are in a similar situation,
so I thought I might use this time to share my story with you.
Before I proceed with my talk,
I will be giving a performance.
Last October, the media art team that I direct, Zero to One,
performed at the Seoul Drum Festival that was held at Gyeongbokgung.
I will be showing you the fourth act of the five that were performed.
Our team actually has a professional drummer and dancers.
But I have to take their places today.
So when you watch me perform, please note that the actual performance was much better.
Thank you. Please turn on the lights.
I was the director of this performance.
So my team's dancers are professionals who majored in dance,
but I occasionally told them that I could probably do better than them.
But now that I have actually performed myself,
I see that it is much harder than I had thought.
As I told you earlier, that was a Zero to One performance.
This is a screenshot of an article from Daum Music,
and at the bottom is a profile picture of our team, that was taken while posing as teen idols.
The second person from the left is me.
I am the director and the youngest member of the team.
At the beginning of my talk,
I introduced myself as a creative director and showed you an interactive performance.
But I think I need to first explain how and why an engineering student
who studied math, calculus and science came to be involved in such activities.
I will explain by showing you some projects that I have done thus far.
I already gave it away, but as I told you earlier,
the number 2.3 is actually what my GPA was after 6 semesters at KAIST, right before I started my military service.
Some of you may be surprised, thinking "Hey, it's higher than I thought".
But this number is not the worst GPA I had, nor is it the average of the 6 semesters.
It is actually the highest GPA I had, and I received it during the only semester I had studied hard- the first semester of my junior year.
So if you look at this number, you could say I was a failure according to KAIST standards.
A loser. Maladjusted
But what I have to say today is not about how you are able to do whatever you want even if you get terrible grades.
Frankly speaking, when I look at my GPA, I do feel a lot of regret.
I often find myself thinking,
'If only I had studied harder', or 'If only I had known earlier about what I know today'.
Then why did I not study in college and dabble in other activities?
This is a famous picture of director James Cameron, when he receives the 1998 Academy Award for best director
and shouts, "I'm king of the world!"
Since I was little, my dream was to become a movie director.
And like what James Cameron said,
I wanted to achieve world domination by being able to control the eyes and ears of every person in the world.
So in college, I thought that since I had studied a lot of math and science, I used enough of my left brain, and should focus on developing my right brain
if I wanted to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a movie director.
So I started directing movies and performances.
These are pictures of me in Cheolwon filming the work "Collision Course",
which was filmed in January, the coldest time of the year.
For this project, "A Director is Silent", I built a set with my friends who are film majors at Hongik University.
This is the same project, and you can see that at the left is a restroom,
and two men have their pants off and are overlapping each other.
Our goal was Cannes, so we dealt with some explicit subject matters at times.
Sometimes I starred in some of my own work.
This work Is called "You PD".
My last name is Yoo, usually spelt as Y-o-o, but the title of this work was Y-o-u PD.
It meant for the audience to become the director.
So if you see the actress at the upper right, you can see a wire.
Cameras were installed on all the actors' heads
so that the audience could actually see the scenes unfolding from the perspective of the actors,
and the stage was designed to create the feel of a play.
And because I like stage performances, I co-founded the company " Mike Impact" in 2009.
At the top is a speech we did at Haeundae during the holiday season,
and at the bottom you can see pictures from another presentation at Korea University.
With the exception of my grades, I think I had a very enjoyable college life.
And being young, I think I regarded receiving an academic warning and getting Fs as a medal to be proud of.
I thought by giving up everything I had, I was demonstrating my devotion toward a new goal.
As graduation approached, I came to realize how my significant my status as a KAIST student was,
despite the fact I had so wanted to erase all my left brain activities.
Inside the fence of a top tier college, I was able to enjoy a tremendous amount of freedom,
and I started to worry whether I would be able to continue freely pursuing my interests once I stepped out of that fence into the real world.
Around that time I read Professor Randy Pausch's book,
and learned about a graduate school called the Entertainment Technology Center.
In this program, people with highly developed left brains such as engineers and programmers,
, and artists with highly developed right brains get together, learn to understand each other, and collaborate on projects.
And I thought, "This is it. I need to go there".
So I decided to compromise with my left brain again.
Ironically, during the application process, though I had filmed movies and planned performances and public speeches,
I finally gained admission to the school as a game programmer due to my KAIST engineering background.
I immediately loved the ETC.
This is what you see once you go into the school and the elevator doors open.
In the hallways there are game machines, lots of figures, beanbags lying everywhere, balls bouncing…
I thought I was in heaven.
This is a game that I made with a group. Similar to the performance I gave earlier today.
So we made games together, and we were even featured in the media.
I'll briefly explain about this game.
So you have a remote sensor above your head, and if you move around, you can dodge snowballs that fly past you.
You can see that I have a really awkward expression on my face.
I was programming the game, but didn't to a very good job,
so at that time, if I moved my head even slightly, the game turned off.
But the media and broadcasting companies and the newspapers contacted us and came to do a story,
so of course we didn't want to let them know that.
I had the same expression that seem to exclaim,
Of course, I didn't just study at grad school.
I also went to parties and had a very pleasant grad school life.
And then I started worrying about my future again. As you can see I have dark circles around my eyes and look very tired.
Frankly speaking, I don't think I had a very good reason when I decided to go to grad school.
I had wanted to put off worrying about the future for another two years, but soon it was time to graduate again.
And that time I concluded, since I learned in grad school how to work creatively as a programmer,
why don't I utilize my left brain to work on more creative projects.
Now, I am carrying out this experiment In Korea.
I was able to work at the Yeosu Expo this past summer.
What you're seeing now is a project I did called the
It's basically project that shows the interaction and communication that goes on between spectators and a 200m screen.
In the case of this project, the motions of the expo visitors were detected,
and when they walked out onto the streets, characters on a screen responded.
It was called
Later, I wondered whether I could apply my technical and engineering knowledge to film,
so I Invested my own money in making a 3D music video, and I also made a KakaoTalk music video utilizing IT.
This is really fun. I can show you later, after the talk.
And I was also able to do the performance I showed you at the beginning of my talk.
These projects that I pursued after grad school have one thing in common.
They apply the left brain, which I had wanted to neglect and suppress when I was young,
and a practical engineering perspective to create the artistic projects that I like.
Many people ask me, "Oh, then have you completely given up your dream?”
They tell me that I’m not pursuing my dream because I’m scared, and making excuses to avoid it.
They tell me that I’m settling with what was handed to me.
Truthfully, that is all true.
But even though I may not be completely faithful to my original dream, I did not settle, nor take the easy way out.
I just approached my dream realistically and am in the process of investigating it.
People rave about stories of people who conquered many trials and tribulations.
Not only that, but they applaud the courage of people who gave up everything they had to take on a new challenge.
Of course, I applaud them too.
But I also had this thought: many people often view their situation negatively, and think that the grass is greener on the other side.
And they envy those who were able to achieve what they could not.
At times, I think it’s good to reflect objectively on your specific circumstances, abilities, and background.
Contemplating the ways your unique background and skills could be applied to what you like to do might help transform your yearning from one of envy into one of aspiration.
So I described my pursuit of my dream not as compromise, but as a convergence. Thank you.