Category Archives: Coursework

Never Leaving A Job Undone

Today I had a meeting with my internship supervisor and team.

We went over the plan of action for the team as we await the decision of the hospital board and continue to try to search for a headlining artist.

It is a possibility that due to the difficulty in finding a major headliner that the board may make the decision to get rid of the concert, not only for this year but possibly permanently. To say it’s a nerve-racking feeling is putting it mildly.

This also left me conflicted as to what I should do in regards to the concert reel and whether it should be completed. After going over ideas that we could come up with to pitch to the hospital board to save the concert (if it comes to that) I made the decision to not leave the job undone and finish the reel.

It’s a lofty goal but now I want my reel to not only inspire any potential sponsors and partners but to also inspire the very people who work to keep St. Mary’s going financially. If there’s anyway that my reel can make them see the long term benefits of what this concert can become and mean to the hospital similar to the annual events that St. Jude’s and Children’s Miracle Network put on then I am up for the challenge.

On Tuesday we as a team will be heading to Bayside to speak with the Board and hear their decision. We will also plead our case to the absolute best of our ability. If it goes well the worst hit we will take as a team will be the paid members of our team will take a huge pay cut and the concert will be postponed till next year.

If it does get postponed till next year even without an internship I will be more than happy to volunteer my time to the team for this concert. St. Mary’s and this concert has become a passion project for me during my time as an intern and if there is anything I can do to help further awareness for this amazing place and organization then I am all for it.

So my weekend will be spent forging ahead. As my grandfather would say regardless of whether or not it may rain I’m planting my rose garden.

During the wait for the hospital’s decision my team members Casey and Victoria and myself joined forces with Current Creative and The Brunch Boys to throw a fundraising brunch at American Whiskey in Manhattan.

Below are some of the photos from the brunch.

 

Roadblocks

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It just wouldn’t be a picnic without the ants. ~Author Unknown

The above quote was something over the past 2-3 weeks I experienced when it came to my internship.

During this time period I suffered with gallstone pancreatitis flare-ups. For those who don’t know pancreatitis is an inflammation of the pancreas. Inflammation is a very apt description for a portion of the symptoms of pancreatitis as you literally feel as if your insides are on fire. In addition it also brings debilitating pain in the back, stomach and chest pressure making breathing difficult, along with nausea and an overall sense of malaise.

During this time I did my best to work through the milder symptom days to complete tasks related to my internship but also my regular job. To say that it was a challenge was an understatement there were some days where I just couldn’t function and even my normal medical remedies were of no help which gave me a sense of frustration of the highest order.

Despite these roadblocks the one thing I realized is that my mind in the moments of not being focused on pain relief was miraculously able to think of various ideas to enhance my current assignment and figure out new ways to help my team.

I was not the only one experiencing roadblocks as my internship team also experienced them as the date for the concert had to be pushed back a month due to the inability to secure a headliner especially not in time for our original May date.

This definitely created a sense of despondency for a bit within the team. But in spite of my health issues I did my best to be a cheerleader for my team in regards to the current situation. I feel as if it worked as the team and I are now back in full force trying to secure a headliner and sponsors for our now June date for the concert.

This has underscored for me how important it is to try to always remain positive and to have a fighters attitude. Giving up should NEVER be an option.

Don’t Fall In Love…Push Yourself

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Don’t fall in love with a design. This is a phrase I’d heard many of my graphic design professors say but hadn’t really experienced how important those words would be for me till last week.

Last week is when I met what was a big decision that I felt would either go really great or really horrible. I decided to make somewhat big changes from the design I previously had. This decision was not entered into lightly and came about for several reasons.

After receiving feedback from my supervisor as well as asking fellow creatives and others to view my draft I  decided to add in the additional elements that Pat wanted. With these changes I ended up adding more elements but cutting back on some of my time which has lead to me having more time to fill. It does mean slowing down certain elements. I’m hoping that the elements I’m including from After Effects will help pace it correctly to get to the end successfully.

I’m adding photographs of past celebrities and performers and plan to animate the images on almost as if they’d come from a photo album. I’m adding photoshop created “polaroids” that will come in from the left and right as well as loose photos that will have photo tabs like those inside vintage photo albums.

Below is some of the “polaroids” I created to include in the reel.

Hitting the Creative Wall

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It’s been a few weeks  since I was given the task of creating the concert reel and I’ve experienced numerous challenges that have slowed down the progress of where I thought I’d be 5 weeks into this task. The setbacks have ranged from managing my time with other senior school projects and regular work commitments as a social media manager to serious health setbacks. But the one setback I feel has affected and frustrated me the most has been hitting the creative wall.

As I delved into the reel and began to peel back the footage I’d placed on my timeline in Premiere I initially felt really good with where I was within the project but as I kept rewatching the visual story I was telling I was feeling as if I wasn’t effectively transitioning the  viewer from one aspect of the story to the next. With this came much frustration and doubt. Doubt in myself that I could get out of the corner I felt i’d somehow boxed myself in.

What I began to do to help myself was listen to various Spotify playlists. I also went to Youtube and began to to look at the reels of various other children’s hospitals and charities such as St. Jude and Children’s Miracle Network as well as the reels for the concert specials of such artists as Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez.

Taking the time to clear my mind and also study what others have done for those in a similar category gave me ideas and inspiration on how I could proceed with the footage I had. Which made me feel more confident with where I am headed  with the reel.

One of the other things that was a confidence booster for me was a meeting we had last week with an executive from Def Jam Records at Pat’s to hopefully secure a partnership. The label partnership would eliminate a large amount of the stress in producing the concert because we would have a headliner secured for each year and not have to do the scramble for one ourselves. The reason the meeting was a morale booster is because at Pat’s request I showed the label executive my first rough draft of the reel and she loved what I had put together thus far. It let me know that I’m on the right path if I could get a seasoned entertainment industry executive excited about the concert and the hospital it means I could get others such as the general public and sponsors to like them.

One of the things that was also challenging was feedback. After I sent the reel to Pat for her review some of the feedback she gave me I expected but the ones where she wanted to see more of certain people and things highlighted was interesting for me because I realized that I’d fallen so in love with the vision in my head of how I thought it should look and what I had already created that a part of me felt almost resistant to changing what I had done.

 

Creative Freedom: A Gift and A Curse?

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At first hearing that I had complete creative freedom to create the reel in my vision I was astounded, excited and a little afraid.

I jumped into the pool with both feet. I immediately went to work on finding music that I thought would fit into what I had in mind. I hadn’t gotten the chance to take an in-depth look at all of the footage I received from Jackie but what little bit I had viewed had given me some ideas as to how I wanted to proceed.

I didn’t storyboard the reel which normally would have been a great thing to do and I think definitely streamlined my process as far as how it was going to be I was going to piece it all together. The primary reason I didn’t do that was because I wasn’t sure what I had within my footage to do with as I might storyboard.

The first thing I did before I touched any of the footage I had obtained was to go on the hunt for music. I searched the internet for a few days and had not found anything I liked when I went to my coworker Jackie again and asked her if she knew of any sites I could find some really quality music for the reel. She recommended the site Pond5. Pond5 is a site that sells music, templates and other things for commercial use. The items are not free. The prices range from $5 and up. I went under the category of encouraging and began bookmarking basically all of the songs that spoke to me and that I felt would be a good fit for a charity but also it’s concert. After several listens to various  songs for the next two hours I chose a song that I listened to several times. I knew it was the one because as I listened to it ideas began to flow into my mind of how I wanted the reel to look, mind you I still had not looked through even a quarter of the footage i had received.

With music chosen I decided to use Premiere to and began importing my footage. A great resource for me as I felt a bit rusty in my Premiere Pro skills was the New York Public Library Lynda.com login. It’s a really great free resource that anyone as long as they have an active NYPL library card can access thousands of Lynda.com tutorials through the NYPL website. It was great because I watched bits and piece of a couple tutorials and picked up shortcuts and tips that saved me quite a bit of time.

Once I imported my footage I began scrubbing through it to see the parts I wanted to use and placing them into my timeline. Because of the plethora of feel good moments I had chosen I decided to place everything down and then peel back. It was after I made this decision and that I received the link to the Justin King “Road to Sixteen” reel that I mentioned in a previous post that Pat sent me. It was with watching that reel that I came to a very critical decision regarding the length of the reel. I decided that it should be no more than 2:20. The previous reel was almost 4 minutes long. Which meant I would have to cut my chosen musical piece which ended at 2:46. This doesn’t seem like much but after listening to the music I had decided that the end part was going to play a very important part in the final version of the reel so it was vital that I keep it.

This is when I realized that with great freedom also comes great responsibility and that this was only going to be first of many possible challenges when it came to this task.