Another life coach names Ashley K was introduced to us and what she hopes to accomplish from her social media sites. Which is to provide helpful information to other small businesses or entrepreneur hopefuls who are starting up a company. She works with StarBaby in order to better her own site and make it look as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

Jordan shared with me Ashley’s brand sheet and pictures they would like use and told me to create web banners or various but appropriate sizes to promote her site in different platforms. This is always a fun type of project in Graphic Design because after you do the designs, you are able to photoshop them onto an existing site in order to see how they would look in the real world. Then you can see if it stands out from the page or gets buried by the other elements. After that you can see how to tweak it in order to have it be a focal point of the page as it is an ad after all and you want to grab people’s attention. It’s almost like getting feedback on your work without having to show it to multiple people and awaiting their replies. There aren’t many projects that allows you to do something like this.

Sacred Oath is a band that works with StarBaby Enterprises for the marketing part of their tours. For example, they wanted a short promo video for their upcoming album. They gave strict directions on how they wanted it to look and even gave time codes for which part of the video they wanted included in the final cut. This is something I’ve never seen before. I’m used to people/clients telling you an IDEA of what they want, and what they want the mood and feel of the video to be like, and then I use my artistic viewpoint to try to match that. This time the directions were clear and the process was simple. Simple, not easy.

I edit using Adobe After Effects because that’s what I was taught in my Motion Graphics class in City Tech. It makes for a cool program to add cool animations and transitions that spice up a video edit. After being introduced to Adobe Premiere by Jordan and watching her edit videos from it, it made it clear that it is a much better software for raw editing. Meaning, if you’re just putting clips together to create a cut, it is perfect for that. Easy to use and renders very flawlessly. After Effects is meant more for the fancy after editing touch ups. Because of how busy a page can get in After Effects, with transitions, text layers, keyframes..etc, it can take a very long time to render and the file size becomes much larger than necessary for most projects. Therefore I have become better acquainted with Premiere and all that it has to offer for me.

Jordan once had told me that they work a lot with motivational speakers and life coaches. I learned about Leslie Simone, who is a life coach who offers advice to a mass group of people during her seminars. She had one coming up, and she wanted to task me with creating a flyer for this client. She put me in touch with a guy named Sly who is in charge of their Graphic Design. Knowing that I also took Graphic Design courses in College, I was tasked with this in order to brush up my skills and see what I remember from my beginnings. It was a quick and painless project, and afterwards I worked with Jordan to improve upon the finished project using my guidelines, only with a different visual hierarchy.

Got introduced to Thomas Kohult. He’s also a part of StarBaby Enterprises. While a very talented person, what he mostly deals with is the camera work and filming aspects. Having an extended conversation with him I was able to learn some very good lessons. As a group, we all talked about what part of the process we enjoy the most when it comes to visual media. When it came to my turn, I revealed that I loved the editing part which we call post-production and I also enjoyed pre-production, which is basically the writing and planning process. I avoid production, actual video shooting, because it’s the most unpredictable part of the process and nothing ever goes to the plan. Tom said he understood, but there’s great value in being around during production of a piece, especially as an editor. You’d be able to see first hand how the shots were supposed to look and get a better look at what the director wants to see out of a certain scene. Which is information you can use later on in editing to match exactly what the vision of the director was. This is a good lesson and I’ve definitely volunteered to be part of any future shoots so I can experience it myself. Looking forward to the future!

As for the meeting itself, it was also great seeing the responsibilities of the other interns who are in Marketing and Public Relations. You can see how other people are involved in the process you are and what it means to the overall project. In situations like these, any information is always welcomed.

All the technical stuff out of the way, Jordan introduced me to a client of hers named Darviny. She owns a YouTube channel called Love Darviny, and uses it to share all kinds of info about health and food. She started working with StarBaby Enterprises in order to make her channel looks more professional and Jordan and the rest of the team are helping her with all aspects of branding. Where I come in is the videos she has shot and wants edited in little segments of her show.

This was a cool first project for me and not too demanding because the videos were all shorts and well shot. She was visiting Paris in the videos and going through different places that were great to watch. One thing about editing is, if you’re not already part of filming crew, watching the videos through and through allows you to experience new things vicariously through the lens. In this example I was seeing parts of Paris that had amazing foods, organic or otherwise and learn a little bit about the culture, especially how people there interact with each other and with their customers. Then after watching all the videos it was time to edit, and that’s always the best part of it; seeing a bunch of non linear videos and making a coherent video out of them. A good first project for me!