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.