Roar baby ROAR

Yes I know, this is now the second post I have titled after the Katy Perry song, I just can't seem to get away from it! At school, Mr. Petty talks about how it will be played all the time at our upcoming NC State Conference for SkillsUSA, and the NCAA seems to absolutely love it for their music videos, which by the way, I made another today! This time however, it was for volleyball, a bit easier to make exciting than cross country... I knocked that out of the park, and tomorrow I am coming in to do my weekly Tampa Bay Bucs stuff! If anyone noticed that I did not post this past Monday, no I did not forget, I was actually in Charlotte with the Digital Media teachers and our Middle Creek Sports Block seniors! We went behind the scenes at the Charlotte Bobcats arena, went courtside during the dance team's practice--erm I mean the shoot around for the players... It was awesome! I got to talk to a lady who was in the marketing department and learned a lot of interesting things!! I have also always loved basketball, so it was a plus! Not to mention the fact that I learned a ton about how to direct the Sports Block for the basketball games as I was watching the big screen for how the professionals did it! NOTE to all of the upcoming students in the Digital Media department... DO NOT under ANY circumstances sing "Shabooya" on the bus at 11 pm... Petty will kill you... And leave you in Charlotte...

For the full album check out my Google+ page at www.google.com/+jasonschmitt

Can YOU see the difference?

Today I got down and dirty with real intern work... Cataloging, organizing, and wiping 40 hard drives to send to other companies! It honestly was pretty fun thanks to the knowledge I gained from my digital media teachers. I got to act like a big shot labeling everything since I know what a Firewire is and can tell the difference between varying types of firewires!

I also got to work on by far my favorite project so far since being there, and that is the "What is the Difference" pictures for the Utah Basketball team. In these pictures I had free reign to create (or destroy) different parts of the picture so that the viewer had to find all 4 in each. This was my favorite simply because it was my first chance to do something with no rules or templates at all, just me and Photoshop. I will post a couple at the bottom of this post so that you too will be able to find the differences!! On a final note, as promised from my Google+ page earlier this week, I am unveiling another piece of my MCHS SportsBlock Fall broadcasting package! Check it out at google.com/+Jasonschmitt! Oh and by the way, one more picture, gotta love the sky that greets me on the way home from work.

Aarrghhhh!

Today I had the day that pretty much every person I know that works wants...  I got in, and due to everyone's emails malfunctioning, there was no work!!  I on the other hand, have a ton of work right now, so I decided to continue working on my Autoshop Academy animation (Follow me at plus.google.com/+jasonschmitt for updates on all my projects!)  I even got another game of ping pong in with Andrew, unfortunately his valiant effort failed him and a late comeback allowed me to win 23-21, still undefeated at the office!!  I have now noticed that I am officially the weekly Tampa Bay Buccaneers guy as well.  I receive all the jumbotron work for their weekly games and have it down pat by now.  SOOO, my day basically consisted of Ping Pong, Tampa Bay Bucs, and NCAA stuff, pretty simple!  Also, I have been thinking of a present I have in mind to give my office on departing...  The ping pong paddles there are pretty rough, duct taped up and everything. I think I will get a nice set of paddles for them upon leaving to thank them for letting me intern there!  If anyone knows of a cheap place to go to buy some great paddles let me know!  This week's gonna be a good one, with the SkillsUSA meeting at MiddleCreek on Wednesday, then returning to the office Thursday. Updates like always will be posted right on this blog so check back for more!!

Moving on

Every day I begin to learn new things and new ways to go about my work. For those of you who didn't know, every Mac actually has an application, Automator, that looks like a little robot, and this robot can help you with so much! It allows you to batch edit basically anything!! I used it specifically to rename, for example, I needed to change file names from BB GAME 1 to BB_GAME_1, and it allows you to do that without having to singularly rename each one. Functions like this will continue to help me way after I am done working there. I am now working more with the University of Utah's jumbotron videos and the fan games that they do. It has definitely been really interesting to see all these different things that go into making something that most people at a sporting event don't think twice about! Never again will I be able to go to a professional sports game without looking at the jumbotron and thinking of what went into making the video currently being played. Today although, I would like to side track just a bit. I have had the honor of helping Middle Creek High School's theatre department by creating the poster for their production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Last night I was fortunate enough to go see it, and it is amazing how good of a show they were able to put together. There was nothing more gratifying to me then to see what type of show I was able to help, and just the pure talent that everyone in the department possessed was amazing. If you do in fact get a chance to come out and see, it will definitely be worth your while!

And you're gonna hear me....

ROOOOAAARRRRR... Officially the most over played song as of late, but an extremely easy song to edit a video to... I created my first music video for BSN today!! Only problem I ran into was.. it was for Cross Country. Yes, cross country, meaning all of my footage was simply people running. If someone can tell me a creative way to edit a bunch of people running, let me know. But nevermind that, it still represented a major step in my work there at BSN and I was excited simply to work on it. Nate, a fellow editor, thought it was a great job and I myself am pretty happy that I was able to make a pretty decent video given the quality footage I had to use. I also continued my undefeated record going 4-0 overall against another of my co-workers beating him 21-12 :). Its funny to know I'm the big guy at the office when it comes to playing ping pong! I hope at some point I will be creating a video from that!

Learning every day

One of the great things I am finding at this internship is I can see myself noticeably evolving in my use of the Adobe Suite. To start, I now use Media Encoder much more even outside of BSN as I find it very useful for batches. I also have learned an awesome function of Photoshop which is droplets. It is very helpful to be able to simply drag a photo to a shortcut on your desktop and it just changes it into whatever you had set the droplet up for.  I am also much more efficient overall when working with Premiere or After Effects, and this is all due to the very tedious tasks that I have done on a daily basis. For example, the rendering Old Dominion Basketball player cards that require me to open a PSD, change the information on it, and then render it out as a jpeg. Another would be going through a premiere file and editing it to conform to a different size (16x9, 4x3, etc). I continue working every day and I seem to be pleasantly surprising my boss Scotty as he was amazed on Thursday that I had finished the work he had given me so quickly... That is what comes from having a lot of practice I guess.

Just a man and a dream

It was a dark and rainy Thursday afternoon, and the cool breeze blew outside as I walked in. A cool chill ran down my spine as I entered into the office, awaiting me there was a fierce foe. The one they call Scotty was there, ready to crush the next challenger in his way.. You are "the one" they said, you are the one who can bring peace to the office by knocking off the all powerful one. The match started, each of us giving our all. He struck, I struck, back and forth we went. We swung with such force that could shatter the windows around us. I returned blow for blow with the steady precision of a sniper preparing for the kill. Then it happened... On the 21st strike, I had won. I, just a little intern had finished off the greatest in the office and had once again brought peace... But of course we're talking about Ping Pong here!! In other words, I went against the normal action when competing with your boss in anything... I won. I knocked off Scotty from his 8-0 record to continue my winning streak at 3-0. Talk about earning your respect! But back to business... Today was great, I edited military banners for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as well as created some lower thirds for Notre Dame's Men and Women's Basketball teams. It was nice having already done the same for The Sports Block at my school, I did not need any help at all and got them done rather quick. That is what eventually led to me beating Scotty down in an exhausting game of ping pong. I look forward to keeping my winning streak going as I progress through the rest of my internship and hopefully that winning streak will continue with my work as well... New kid on the block reporting for duty!

And the winner is....

Today was by far my favorite of the internship thus far! I was charged with cutting out the headshots of the Notre Dame Men's Basketball team and finished them very quickly. I also got ahead on my work for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the rest of the week. I got all this done by 3 and went over to talk to Doug about what else I could do. I ended up playing him in ping pong and beat him 21-6! It was then that I played Andrew (2nd best in the office) and won 27-25, in what my co-workers were calling the "best game ever." These guys also compared for the "Best game ever II" which is supposedly when I play Scotty on Thursday. He is undefeated at the office so far, and I hopefully will be the first to change that! It's funny that now I am most excited to play ping pong... This free time also allowed yet another chance for me to connect with my co-workers and it was an awesome day of "work." I mean sometimes it's so hard to play ping pong... you have to get up and move around and such.

Movin on up!

Today was a unique day to say the least... I was put in charge of editing a massive snapshot template for the NCAA for Division II and III Field Hockey. This essentially was a template where I put pictures in place and they came across the screen to display key moments throughout the championship games. The render time involved with this project also allowed me a chance to talk to Andrew, one of the editors. I found out from him that he and Scotty (Head honcho) were the best ping pong players of the company (As soon as you walk into BSN there is a big ping pong table in the middle of the office) and I, being a ping pong player, said I'd have to beat him sometime... Hopefully pretty soon I'll be able to play SOMEONE in ping pong, all depends on getting my work done! Which, today, getting it done early allowed me to go over and talk with Doug and Andrew for a while about certain projects and clips I may be working on in the future. It's always good to connect better with your co-workers and I have already overcome the obstacle of being the youngest one (by a large margin) in the workplace at Coffee & Crepes. Right now I'm looking to try and do that again, and something as simple as swinging a paddle may provide me with the means to do that...

Templates, Templates, TEMPLATES

Today was one of the busiest days that I have had! Also, one of the more mind numbing experiences... Unfortunately, I knew coming into this job that I am extremely behind the people who work there (Obviously), and I knew I would be put on tasks that really anyone could do. Which leads me to the title, templates. Today I was put in charge of editing templates for headshots that are sent off to the NCAA for them to use in multiple sports. To do this, I had to painstakingly edit a template for multiple different sports and adjust certain aspects of each to match each other. On top of that, each one needed 4 different formats!! 720p 1080p 4x3 and 16x9. Needless to say, it was a lot of work, not a lot of difficulty. This is part of the job however, I have to do these little things in order to earn trust. These little tasks I picture as stepping stones, and the better I begin to make them, the higher I'll rise and eventually may begin to get higher level work. For the time being though, I am extremely satisfied. Because the work is so tedious and tiring, I am learning how to increase the speed of my workflow and I am learning many little tricks that help to make certain functions easier. Lord knows I can cut out a headshot from any background like nothing now, and that is all because of the number of headshots I have had to edit as of late. On a side note, all this work in after effects may come in handy real soon, as I am being actively recruited to edit highlight reels for some of my classmates $$$. Perfect example of how something as simple as an internship can have real important consequences on my life.

Luck of the Irish

Well as I had hoped, I am now being fed my own projects and am able to do them very well. Recently, I have been in charge of a lot of cutting out of headshots for Notre Dame. Today I was given the women's basketball team to do and I learned very quickly... I HATE women's basketball teams. This has nothing to do with the sport, I love basketball, but the hair. As if cutting out hair wasn't hard enough, some girls decided to go above and beyond to make my life difficult with their curls! However difficult, I feel I have done a great job on them and that may be why I am being given more. I also have been in charge of helping Nate with other Notre Dame stuff such as what plays on the big screen boards before the game starts. These tasks are actually quite simple, but take a lot of time and if I didn't have a lot of prior knowledge of After Effects, I wouldn't be able to do it. What I am really excited about this week is that I have finally moved past, if barely, the templates. Today was the first time I was given a project and had to create it, not edit a template. It simply gives me a better feeling to know that (in the words of Mr. Petty) I MADE THAT. So far I am loving it and I can't wait what awaits me the rest of the week

3rd Day

Today, I got down to business right away... I also found out that I am more inter-connected in this internship than I thought! Mr. Furse knows one of the editors I work with!! Andrew, the editor that helped me become acquainted with BSN's network and documents, actually was in the same major as Mr. Furse, Ms. Trevino, AND Mr. Furse's wife! Such a small world considering Mr. Petty used to work for the same company, it almost is like I am just now yet another connection between BSN and MCHS... But ANYWAYS, I digress... Getting in today, I was put right on doing some graphics work for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and also edited a few videos for their big screens. It amazes me how much work actually goes into every bit of a football game, or any production for that matter. I know now that I will never look at a football game the same way again (I already can't watch  a game on TV without thinking about the camera iris because of TheSportsBlock...) In short, I am having a great time so far and I am starting to feel more comfortable. Still waiting on being challenged in ping pong by one of my co-workers :) I am lookin forward to smokin them!

1st Day

Today, I braved the 35 minute drive out to North Raleigh for the first time by myself. The ride, other than being a little nerve racking (I was about to start fresh at a company) went smoothly, and I took my time getting to BSN. Upon arriving, I was introduced to Andrew, the editor with whom would be helping me out with my projects and who I would be able to go to for questions. I was immediately set up in an office with a huge 27 inch Mac Display and, as if that wasn't enough, also had 2 other monitors, speakers, and a mac pro sitting under the desk (This however, will be shortlived joy as I am simply using another man's office until he arrives at the company in a few weeks). I was put to work editing some AfterEffects templates and changing the text in them. This proved to be surprisingly difficult, as the projects housed 15 different comps and had to be messed with in order to even work. After a bunch of working with, I finally got to work, and ended up completing my project and sending it off before I left at 5. This day left me excited to go back, and I cannot wait to see what I will work on next!

-J