Category Archives: Internships

The End of The Road?

I have come to the point in my internship where I managed to complete the required hours well almost a month ahead of schedule.

It’s both an exhilarating but almost unsure feeling. Unsure because even though I have completed the school requirements there is so much I want to still give and accomplish to this position.

I guess the real question is after Tuesday which is our team meeting with my supervisors permission and blessing do I continue or would it be wiser to tie up any loose ends and step back and use the time I devoted to my internship to other senior requirements.

It’s a sense of confliction I did not expect to feel. I’m not quite sure how to proceed. Perhaps I will ask my Professor’s advice and or pray on what course of action I should take.

Either way I feel as sense of also nervous excitement. It feels as if I’m stepping more and more into the untethered uncertainty of the Real World.

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.

 

Getting Back On the Horse

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I never realized until recently how hard it can be to get back onto the horse as they say after being sick, which considering my extensive medical past is pretty interesting.

I wonder if getting very sick when you’re younger makes a difference in how you get back or if the process is really the same it’s just that  being older you’re more conscientious of how challenging it is.

I found my self struggling to get back into a editing groove with my concert reel assignment not because I’d lost interest I just didn’t seem to have the energy to focus on it. It was like I could focus on everything else but that.

This frustrated me for several reasons. The first reason being that I WANTED to finish it and see my complete vision that is in my head come to completion. Second: I like to keep my word. Disappointing someone by promising something and then not delivering is one of the worst feelings in the world for me.

It wasn’t until I was completely alone at work and felt really well rested that I was finally able to open the file back up and begin making adjustments. One of the things that helped spur me was being able to render the version I had and have my senior project advisor give me feedback on it. Watching what I had put together thus far through fresh eyes enabled me to see changes that I wanted to make as well as changes my advisor suggested I should make which I agreed with since I was able to now notice things that I hadn’t before.

So with these fresh eyes I am now back on the proverbial horse and working on changes. It’s a very ambitious goal but I am determined to have at least a fully completed second rough cut done by next week.

I feel that any minor tweaks that may need to be made can be made after getting feedback from my    internship supervisor as well as my other team members.

 

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.

Receiving My First Big Task

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My first two and half weeks at my internship primarily consisted of brainstorming sessions. It was near the end of the second work week that I received my biggest task thus far. To create a new reel promoting the concert.

I was thrilled and overjoyed to get this opportunity. It was the perfect project to be given that would encompass the majority of skills that I had gained during my time in college.

The first step I needed to take in order to begin the reel  was to obtain footage. Obtaining footage was surprisingly far more challenging than I thought it would in spite of the fact Pat had plenty of DVDs from the previous years of the concert. I examined many of the DVDs and discovered majority of them were duplicates of a few select years of the concerts existence.

I  reached out to my co-worker Jordan who shoots and edits for the TeenNick show TeenNickTop 10. It is a show that my boss Nick, executive produces and also is the primary host of. Jordan unfortunately was out of town but I thankfully was able ask our assistant editor Jackie, for TeenNickTop 10 if she knew of any hospital footage on one of the multiple external hard drives in our office. Thankfully there was. She gave me access to the drives and helped me pull the exact folders I would need.

After getting the footage from Jackie I sent out an email to Pat and my remaining team members, Casey and Victoria requesting their input in terms of music or any particular footage if it was available they would like to see. They gave me the greenlight to create as I saw fit and they would give feedback once a rough cut was produced.

Welcome to The Most Rewarding Experience Ever

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“Welcome to the most rewarding experience ever”. Those were the words that my supervisor Pat said to me on my first official day of beginning to work with her.

From the first day myself and the rest of my team members hit the ground running. Our first order of business was to begin compiling names for our headlining artist for the annual “Nick Cannon Rocks Times Square” concert or NCRTS as we call it for short.

We all sat around the table at Pat’s and called out names of big name artists as a random Spotify playlist played in the background. Some of the artists whose names we called out included performers who’d done the concert in the past such as Justin Bieber (when he was very freshly on the music scene), Jon Bon Jovi, Ne-Yo and Fabolous to name a few. Being as this would be the tenth year that Pat had been in this line of work having previously come from the world of Sports Marketing with the likes of Sports Illustrated and the NFL we thought it should be as big and huge as we could make it not to mention the benefit it would bring to St. Mary’s in terms of sponsorship dollars.

My first task was to look over a Thank You card that was created and tweaked from the previous year by my coworker Casey. The card would be going out to people who had been sponsorship partners and guests at the concert.

I admit I felt conflicted at first about looking over Casey’s work since I was fairly new to the team and I did not to make seem as I as if I was better than her simply because I am a design student and she is not. But thankfully I was able to ignore those thoughts and focus on the project. My review of Casey’s work went will. There were a few minor adjustments that I suggested should be made. My supervisor agreed and  and we continued on to the most important part of the whole concert which is finding an A-list artist.

Getting An Internship

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Getting my internship was a topic that caused me excitement and fear. The excitement came from knowing it signified it being part of the path to graduation and fully being out in the field but also caused me fear because I was afraid that I would be unable to find anything within my chosen module.

I began asking around at my workplace if anyone knew of anything but no did as far as my chosen field and I faced the daunting possibility of being one of the thousands who apply for internships to Viacom and get rejected.

I obtained my internship in a way that happened so perfectly it was as if I wrote in a script.

I met my internship supervisor Patricia, by chance. She came for a meeting with my boss, Nick Cannon about two years ago to discuss his upcoming charity concert for St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital which is located in Bayside, Queens. We only exchanged a brief hello. Last year due to personnel changes I was able to actually interact with Pat (as she likes to be called). It is through this interaction that she was able to get an idea of some of my capabilities and skills and I was able to gain knowledge on what she did. It was this interaction that brought me to a light bulb moment. I realized that I could bring skills that would be of use to her and St. Mary’s and complete my internship but of course it all hinged on whether she said yes or no.

A few days after last year’s benefit concert I stopped by Pat’s home which is also her office space and has been for the past 10 years. She and I sat down and I presented my case for interning with her and her team for the next years concert. I was thrilled and relieved when she said yes.

She let me know straightaway that it would be a lot of work but also very rewarding. Not only because I would be getting the college credit that I needed but  also because St. Mary’s cares for some of the sickest children within New York City and every little bit that is done to increase awareness or a helping hand is greatly appreciated and needed.