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Hi! My name is Victor Grigas. I'm a video producer and photographer. My CC-licensed photos have been seen in Vice, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Macworld, The New Republic, Science, Fast Company, Psychology Today, CBS, Spiegel, the New York Review of Books, Atlas Obscura, WTTW / Chicago Tonight, PBS NewsHour, Piauí, Wikimedia and many others.

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  Me, photo CC by-SA 2.0 by Sage Ross

Years ago, I was a storyteller for the Wikimedia Foundation. I have been a volunteer contributor to Wikipedia since 2005. I have a formal education in film, audio and video and am interested in all things open source and public domain. I've worked with all kinds of budgets for my video productions. If you have a project in mind feel free to reach out to me to ask any questions: victorgrigas (at) gmail (dot) com

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  I took this photo in the 'War Room' of the Wikimedia Foundation during the 2012 blackout of Wikipedia in protest of proposed SOPA legislation.

My father was also a photographer -- I guess the acorn didn't fall far from the oak. When he passed away in 2017, I started a fundraiser to digitize his entire photo archive. One thing I learned from him was a joy in capturing people on camera. A lot of people hate how they look, and if you can make them comfortable, then you can get them in a good look and you can get a portrait that will give them a positive sense of who they are.

One of the complexities of making video for Wikimedia has been how to make videos with on-screen text translatable. Many videos I've produced have had the need to be translated into different languages for different audiences, and to do that it has meant publishing one 'finished' version with burned-in text in my language and another without any text in it at all that can be used by volunteers as a template to add text in any other language, using the version in my language as a guide. This allows anyone to edit using any video editing software they are comfortable using. The translatable version also displays all the photo, audio and video assets in a gallery under the video with links to all other known published derivative works. This is not the same as publishing an edit decision list or other video editing assets. That option was not desirable because those assets are not universally compatible with all editing software and are not always open source. You can read my blog post about this.

I take a particular joy in illustrating Wikipedia articles with photos or video. Because Wikipedia is open source, it can be endlessly copied, which gives it great resilience against being deleted or otherwise lost.

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  This is the oculus in the Pantheon in Rome. I wanted to show the whole room.

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  I'm originally from Chicago, and the sign on the theatre is a symbol of the river that forks through the city.

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  This is a monument to the Haymarket affair.

When I was in college in 2008, I made a short film about technology and isolation that you can watch below. I'm hoping to make it into a feature film. If you like it, you can donate to that effort.

One of my enthusiasms is playing video synthesizers. As you can see in the video below, the output is colorful and reactive to audio. Once you set up the patch you like, they are wild to play -- you sort of need to bracket where the image can and cannot go and just hold on and see what happens.

Thanks for reading!

All content copyright © 2024 Victor Grigas (unless otherwise noted).
Here's my B&H wish list, and Paypal.