WEEK 1

This is my first week interning at Much Obliged TV and I’m already off to a good start.  I learned that most of the content they produce in the studio goes to their social media accounts and YouTube.  There are a lot of projects and shows coming up that will be edited and uploaded every week. There’s a lot of artists coming to the studio to display their art at a gallery show, done few times a month, and musicians to perform few of their pieces for promotional purposes.  To get used to the new work environment, my manager Ricky has us doing some of the simplest tasks. We started off with file management and organization so that work process between each person is fluent and that every person knows where to look for a file that you worked on for additional edits.  I started using lot of the techniques that I learned in my classes, such as saving multiple versions of a project file as I progress in the design or edit process to keep a backup file to go back to incase something goes wrong in the editing process. I also started working on my time management as well, since there’s a due date to all of the projects the design process has to be time efficient and priorities has to be made to keep everything on time.  Since I already have experience in video editing, they gave me some of their already shot footage to chop down and make a five to eight minute video. There’s a lot of hands on work, and a lot of creative process so I am hoping that I will be getting a lot out of this internship.

WEEK 2

This is week two of my internship and I have already met all the people that work in the studio, great staff a

nd great management.  Everybody’s very friendly and respectful to each other, and it starts to fill like a one big family in the creative world. Apparently Much Obliged Tv is a studio that works for a bigger company called Superchief Studio, which collaborates with lot of artist to host gallery shows and have their art displied.  Superchief also hosts events where all the creative people can come together, share their stories with each other and have fun while DJs play live music. The role of Much Obliged is to make experimental shows, where the most successful shows will be adapted by Superchief and be sold to some of the famous TV channels such as MTV.  Even though Much Obliged is an experimental studio, there’s still a lot of production process that goes into it, including setting up cameras, lights and various types of sound equipment. Which then goes to post production, syncing sound, switching camera angles and inserting B-roll to make it more dynamic and presentable for a video format. This week I also found out that a part of the studio has been rented by Troma Industries, company that produces low budget independent films since 1974.  Most of their films are of the horror genre, and this is a new film that they have been working on. Coming to the studio and seeing them setup for filming,I saw a lot of disturbing props, such as chickens with pineses attached to their stomachs and pigs with human breasts. Asking about it I found out that the storyline of their new film is a mad scientist who performs scientific experiments on animals. I don’t know how I felt about that but art has no boundaries and their films certainly do have a big number of audience.

 

WEEK 3

This is week three of my internship and everything’s going great so far.  Something funny happened this week. We were suppose to have an artist Ryan Bock come in to our studio and have an interview with him. Ryan Bock is an artist who specializes in painting, drawing, puppetry, animation and experimental film methods.  However, for an unknown reason he send his brother dressed like him to do the interview. The artist always wears a ski mask as a part of his look and nobody noticed that this was not really Ryan Bock until the mid interview, where he was giving us general answers to all the questions and not being specific or detailed about himself.  Not having met the real Ryan Bock, we didn’t expect to be tricked into a fake interview. Later after the interview we looked up to see what the real like Ryan Bock looked like and he definitely had way less tattoos on his arms then the fake, and was way skinnier. Not calling out the artist on it, us of course made the best cut out of the interview and went along with it.  Being a video editor you don’t alway get the footage you plan ahead for, and being a good video editor you always improvise and make the best out of what you have.

 

WEEK 4

This is week four of my internship and we had a live band play at out studio this week.  “Max Pain and the Groovies is a psychedelic high energy garage rock and roll group from Salt Lake City. Max Pain and the Groovies established their roots skateboarding together and jamming since adolescence.” I came in to the studio them already setting up their instruments, I helped mainly with camera setup, there was a projector displaying graphics on the background and the sound was recorded on a separate channel to get the best out of it while converting from analog to digital.  They performed few of their songs and after their performance we setup for an interview as always. Editing the videos took us few days since the sound had to be farther worked on, then synced it with the video and made cuts to switch between camera angles and make it more dynamic for a video format. We also had one of the interns design an animated intro for the series of musical show that we call Tuned. The final Product came out really interesting.

 

WEEK 5

This is week five of my internship and we had another musician come in to perform for us.  “Derek Piotr (b. 1991) is a Poland-born producer and composer based in New England, whose work focuses primarily on the voice. His work covers genres as diverse as glitch, leftfield pop, chamber, dance, and drone.”  He performed one of his pieces for us and after that as always we setup for an interview, he talked about how being a queer individual in the music industry, he struggled identifying himself as a person, not wanting to be criticized for it, or on the other hand get hired just for being a minority.  He said that he doesn’t want his sexual believes to play any part in his music career and that he wants to be judged solely on his talent for music. Hearing this from him I also believe that your work should never be judged based on you as a person but for your talent, skills and method of delivery.  Not every person will like your work, there will always be at least one person who will criticize your work but that critic should always be based from an artistic point of view.

 

WEEK 6

This is week six of my internship and this week we went on a location shoot.  My manager Ricky is a professional DJ who DJs at a bar in Greenpoint named Counting Room, and we went there to shoot our new show called “Drink History.” Since Ricky works there, the owner of the bar let us use their basement bar for the whole day without charging us anything, which was very convenient for our budget, and which also in return, was a form of promotion for the bar.  We started off with setting up all the cameras, lights and the sound equipment, we then tested everything with a test shoot to make sure everything would go smooth and got ready to shoot the whole season of the show. We had different bartenders come in to the bar, making all sorts of cocktails and talking about the history of the drink and, who created it, when and where, and told  personal anecdotes they had associated with the drink. There were lot of fun stories I heard that involved all these drinks and learned new things while having fun shooting the show. After the whole day of shoot we finally finished it up, packed everything back and the day was over. I then was assigned to edit the season for the rest of the week, making all the important cuts from one angle to another, making graphics to make the show more aesthetic, color correction to match all the footage up, and color grading to give the video more cinematic look.  The project files were then passed down to another intern to further add graphics and reference videos from films and comedy sketches which would visually help support the stories told in the videos. The series are not done yet but should be done soon, and we’ll be publishing them within a week or two.

 

WEEK 7

This is week seven of my internship and halloween is coming up in few weeks.  Besides all the shows and creative content, we also make vlogs to keep the audience up to date to what we are up to in studio.  To make the vlogs even more interesting, every person working there has a character assigned to them based on their personality and visual, and we try to incorporate some techniques and scenes from film.  For this month we have decide to create a storyline with a halloween theme that will build up to the day of Halloween and then continue in a regular phase as we solve the mysterious and spooky events taking place at the studio.  For the first week of October, we have decided to create a storyline where Steve, the assistant manager, notices Ricky slowly dying and turning into a Zombie. Steve then tries to notify everyone on what he saw in the studio but everybody considers it nonsense from a sleep deprived Steve.  Steve not knowing what to do, calls Alyx, one of the interns, to help him with one of her card reading seances and find out what’s really going on. For this week’s vlog, I shot few of the scenes but Steve took the editing on himself and I was assigned a different project. This week went well as well and lets see what the next one brings.