Alex Feng's ePortfolio

I could not attend any events at the company nor really meet anyone face to face as everybody is remotely working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I did have one phone call with one of the two bosses of VRR Media Productions. He is the only one which I could kind of say is a mentor, but he only taught me things that weren’t really related to the actual work that I was doing. It was more of the background process or minor steps that I should be mindful while working on a project such as organization and writing things down so it could be passed down to future interns.

I will be self-evaluating my performance for my first assigned project. Going into this internship, I wanted to make a good impression and have a great start. I put a lot of effort into the first project by getting creative and fancy. I used tools that most designers may not have access to such as Trapcode and used my knowledge to create a beautiful animated 3D background. However, I did run into trouble trying to figure out how to accomplish the tasked that was assigned. I was given a reference and I did my best to replicate it, but I could not achieve the results that I wanted. The reference had many pictures in a 3D animated word, but I was only able to get one picture which made it look a bit unpleasing. No matter what I did I could not achieve the results that I wanted, but thankfully the supervisor loved it and wanted me to continue on with what I was doing.

There was only  one collaborative project that I have worked on during my internship. I was assigned the task to create short video clips from a long interview. Those clips had the purpose of being highlights to get attention and spread awareness of the issue that was being addressed in the interview. There are about five people working on this project as there was the person who was in charge of sound editing, someone creating the intro, someone managing the social media accounts where these clips would go on and me plus the supervisor. I just communicated with them via email as everybody is working remotely, but there wasn’t really anything successful about it since there are delays waiting on each other to check emails and reply.

There are only a few new things that I have learnt on the job as mostly everything else is just a repeat from what is taught from school. The first thing is how much importance there is when it comes to properly naming conventions. The second thing is creating a text file to go with the video file and listing out many steps, processes, what the video is used for, etc. On another note, I am not performing any clerical duties as my hands are full of tackling on the tasks that are given to me that require my full attention such as working on motion design projects or video editing projects. My typical day on the internship though is jump straight into the work or if I am starting a new project, then I research a bit, gather the resources, then get into work with my creativity.

Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, I cannot truly experience the culture of my workplace as I am remotely working from home. However, I would say that the attire is informal because I dress very casually in a t-shirt and shorts while I work. I do not know much about the typical employee work station, but my work station is just at my desk with two monitors where one of them is extremely wide and another monitor is the standard one which could be found normally at any workplace. As for the typical employee workday, the hours are from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, but interns have flexible schedules. However, I always get my lunch on time around 1:00 PM without fail.

I currently have two roles at VRR Media Production where I am both a video editor and a motion designer. My supervisor name is Christina Fitzpatrick and I selected this internship because the other internships that I applied to haven’t gotten back to me quickly enough. Also, I had a sense of urgency so I decided to just intern for VRR Media production for the summer of 2020 as it was my internship professor who recommended it to me. As for the interview process, it was over the phone due to the current COVID-19 pandemic and it was one on one. It was very short in the sense that I was only asked when I was available to start. I was somewhat surprised as I expected to be asked more questions or have a longer interview, but thankfully I now have a intern position with VRR Media Productions.