6/1 – Today I continued work on the board meeting edit. It went smoothly until I found out that one of the tapes was logged in under the wrong format. Consequently, I had to re-capture the footage which equated to about an hour of waiting time. I feel a lot more comfortable with Premiere Pro, having worked with it the past few weeks. Today was also the day that a few other interns started working, one of whom was also a graphic design intern. Jenny, my design supervisor, and I had a prior conversation about how there would also be a third design intern coming in later this summer and expressed how difficult it would be for her to manage all three of us. We both agreed that it would be a lot better for her if I did primarily video work, since I was the only intern working in two areas. I am actually excited about this decision, since it will give me a lot more time to get a hang of video editing.
I also participated in my first team meeting with the Footnote producers and the other interns. They discussed with us plans for the next month and ideas for future episodes. The goal is to have a 13-episode season. Some of the ideas for future episodes included sex trafficking, love and marriage, evil, and homelessness. I learned that ABC Family, MTV, and TLC have all reviewed the pilot episode. The most likely landing spot for a fall premiere would be either ABC Family or MTV.
6/2 – It was a rough day. I had continued working on the video of the board meeting and finally finished it. Or at least I thought I did. During the meeting, many of the speakers presented slide shows and video clips. But most of the video cameras only shot the speakers, so none of the visuals could be seen on video. It turned out that the producers wanted the slide shows and video clips to be included in the video. Adding the video clips would be fairly simple, but since Premiere Pro doesn’t accept PowerPoint, I had to take a screen shot of each individual slide. This definitely was frustrating, because many of the presentations were lengthy and I have to wait to get all the presentations sent to me.
I also decided to do some research on Footnote today and I came across an article and a short summary. 1, 2
Finally, today I found out that my video editing supervisor, Jamie, would be in Pittsburgh for the next ten days to do some filming and editing with Footnote’s main motion graphics director and editor. She left me with essentially three tasks: 1) Continue working on the board meeting video 2) Start a new project that was similar to the board meeting. This one involves logging and editing a lecture series given by Back to the Bible’s president. The amount of footage for the lecture series is about three times as much as the board meeting. 3) Begin tutorials from lynda.com – a site that posts training videos of software. Back to the Bible has paid for an annual subscription.
6/3 – I decided to take a break from the board meeting edit and decided to spend the whole day taking a look at tutorials while at the same time starting to log the lecture series. There were 18 DV tapes that I had to log, each with anywhere between 45-60 minutes of footage. The tutorials were very interesting, and I enjoyed taking the time to watch them. I mainly watched a video for Premiere Pro but looked at some for Adobe After Effects as well. Today was the first time I felt like I was learning for the entire duration that I was working. Some of the tutorials I looked at included basic editing, transitions, capturing, and using audio and video effects.
6/8 – Today I continued with the tutorials and came back to finish what I could with the board video. I still have yet to receive all of the speakers’ PowerPoints. After talking with one of the producers today, I learned that while the videos I will be making will be shown to some of the top execs in the company. She told me that after these larger projects are done, I’d be doing some more little “fun stuff”. This definitely gave me the motivation I was looking for to finish these projects. The fact that some important people will be viewing this definitely makes me want to make some well-done videos. I decided to go back and to do some more revisions to the video as I wait for more PowerPoints.
6/9 – With Jamie gone, I feel really isolated. She usually sits next to me, during my internship hours. It doesn’t help that I have the same projects I’ve been working on for a while now. The tutorials still keep me active and awake, but the logging and editing of the videos is really boring, in all honesty. Today, I started to take a look at the After Effects tutorial, which was over 16 hours worth of videos to watch! I started with some basics, but wanted to take a peek ahead and saw some pretty neat videos – Color corrections, basic animations, and even lightsaber effects! So far, these tutorials are my favorite part of the internship experience. This in some ways is kind of disappointing because I was hoping I would have some more of a direct contribution to the Footnote TV show. But this is understandable, because of the lack of experience I have with video.
6/10 – Nothing new. I continued looking at tutorials and logging the lecture series video. I had a small project involving a short promotion clip called “Meet Jack”. The premise of the clip was to advertise one of Back to the Bible’s services, 411God. 411God is an application that sends bible passages to one’s cell phones periodically throughout the day. “Meet Jack” was about a man named Jack, showing his life before and after 411God. My job was to remove an old logo from the end of the video and fade it to black. While the edit itself was simple, getting it onto a DVD was a little tricky. I hadn’t realize that I had to deal with settings such as widescreen and HD. This gave me a chance to explore deeper into Premiere Pro and sort of learn for myself how to get things right. This small project took only about 45 minutes, but it was a nice break from my usual routine.
Here is a YouTube video from a few months ago showing a little bit of Back to the Bible here in Lincoln and some of the people I work with.
