I've recently been in cohoots with director Neil Payne of RockChalk Pictures, an Orange County resident whose portfolio includes music videos, commercials and short films. Last weekend I put together his demo reel, editing and titles:
A couple weeks before that I helped with post on his latest Nike Spec, "Hold That Bus". I'm credited for editing, but that's a very generous nod, as the entire thing is one continuous shot. I simply mixed and aligned the music and added the graphics at the end:
Looking back, my internship experience at Goodspot was a mixed bag. I’m a little wiser for it, and I did gain some new friends, but it comes with some sour memories. After Goodspot, I took a short internship run at a post-production facility called Secret Headquarters. It was cool. The small staff was great. There was a marked (superior) difference in how this company managed itself. A good experience. Shortly after that in December I was lucky enough to get a job I found on Craigslist, working as a night editor for a company called Splash News. I’ve been working there ever since, now during the day with a bigger (still not big enough) paycheck.
“Did you hear?” Kyle asked me. “Hear what?” I responded. “We’re officially closing down on Friday.” There wasn't any sense of surprise in either of our voices. It never was a matter of “if” but “when”. Let it be known, this internship did not faze me out of the child-like eagerness of the experience. I felt like I worked my hardest, and I got the most out of it that I could. However, It did open me to an awareness of the actual situation that the industry is in. Goodspot closed for several reasons, and those reasons were apparently present for years. But the economy is such that it is taking no survivors, and those who are surviving are those packs of teenagers from Red Dawn. I plan to be one of those survivors.
Amidst the desperate search for salvation, Richard was able to get a gig from an old contact. We were set to do a trailer for a made for cable disaster movie for Showtime starring Casper Van Dien, entitled “Turbulent Skies”. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds. Kyle and I work in designing the titles for it, though with a tired sense of gloom. I make a run to Blockbuster to check out a list of different airplane disaster movies. I figure its just research until Mark sends me to dub bits of airplane footage from the movies onto the tape deck, so it can be used in the trailer. Apparently there were no good plane shots in the rough cut of the movie. Again, I question the integrity of it all.
California is one of the worst hit states in the national recession. I heard that a lot, but this was the week Goodspot really felt the effects of it. In just a few short weeks, the company went from successfully completing one of the biggest jobs in its history to facing the threat of going under. We weren’t going under just yet, but I did the lunch run for the company as Richard explained to them how bleak the horizon looked. The Hilary Food Security job paid more in prestige than in money, and there are absolutely no promising gigs in the future. Richard called for a big rally to find the clients who’ll save us out of the black, but there was already defeat in his voice. Still, I was sent to glean the World Wide Web for potential clients. I found several dozen Marketing VP contacts everywhere from independent production companies to video game companies.
This week I got reports back that the “Stick Up” clients loved the titles and wanted to keep them. Sweet! Nothing else worth note really happened this week. I noticed that I was doing more and more personal assistant type duties for the boss, Richard. Such as making a run to buy frames and framing his personal photos. I did everything with a smile, but really questioned the integrity of it all. I’m happy to do just about anything, but I’m not one to be taken advantage of. The moral conflict of earning your stripes and being a lackey is something I will toil with while I continue to be in the trenches as an intern.
With the company collectively recovering from the rush that was the Hilary Food Security job, business continued as usual, which seemed to be very little. We had a kick off meeting for a small independent film “The Stick Up Kids.” Don’t worry, no one else has heard of it either. They hired us to do a trailer for them. I watched the selects, and if those were the selects, it would be a challenge to make this film look good.
The design director, Kyle, had offered me an open desk in his office and some freedom to do some design work. This was a result of a conversation we had in which I let him know I had experience working in AfterEffects. He let me take the lead in designing the look and titles for this trailer. I was thrilled!
I had watched some of the footage, and there was some cheap gunplay in the opening scene, so I decided I would use a gun as an image. I made a stenciled desert eagle become the “I” in Stick Up, with the words springing up around the gun after it was cocked. It worked okay. David the editor, and Romina took a look at it and it wasn’t the direction they wanted to go. The film, in the long run, had little to do with guns, and they were only scene briefly.
After rethinking it, I had seen a lot of images of stacks of cash and talk of money in the dialogue. So I changed it to that route. I talked with Kyle and decided to create a background of a 100-dollar bill, and have the titles being printed on the bill where the serial numbers would go. We went with it. I created the images and animated the texts in AfterEffects, and it went pretty well with the tempo of the trailer.
And here it is! The titles I animated are the ones at the end starting with "Stick Up" through the title "The Stick Up Kids". Kyle did the rest.
Came in for a few hours over the weekend. Everybody camped out to try to meet the deadline on this Food Security Video. We’re getting Matt Damon to do the narration! Unfortunately he won’t be in the office, but recording from a studio in New York. I’m continuing to fritter away on istock, and just doing anything I can to help things run smoothly while everyone else is frenzied. The Clinton Global Initiative was premiering the video that upcoming Friday the 25th. Goodspot, after long and stressful hours, pumped the finished product out by Wednesday night. The whole company took a well deserved Thursday and Friday off.
Everything at Goodspot has cranked into overdrive as we are getting the final go ahead from the Department of State for the Food Security Presentation. My job this week consisted of two main duties – lunch and stock footage. Not an hour was wasted, and many more overtime hours spent in putting this project together. I got to know the clerk at the café next door on a first name basis, as I was making lunch runs daily. My other job was to find stock footage. The State Department wanted the emotional impact of powerful images with powerful music. There was no time or money to freelance photographers, so the only other option was to look for already existing footage. I was given long lists everyday throughout the day of different things I needed to find footage for—“impoverished children”, “farmers”, “close-ups of different ethnicities,” etc. The tough part was, I could only use footage found on istockphoto.com. You will not believe how many fat, happy, white kids are on istock. The website is found wanting in anything diverse. I became the master in indirect searching and tricking search engines. Needless to say, I was timely in response to any footage request, and gave the editor a variety of choices. Intern: 1, Istock: 0.
I wrote all these months ago. But have been off the blog path for a time. So introducing the "Retroactive Posts" for my time as an intern for Goodspot. Foreshadow: tragic end is inevitable.
Intern Report: Week 2 (Sept. 8-11)
More clerical work, and me getting used to the phones. However, there are times that I find myself doing nothing at the front desk. So, after a few days, I brave one of the bays where Mark, the junior editor, is working and ask if I can just hang out and shadow him.
I watch him work, and ask him some bland questions. After awhile, I’m helping him lay down tapes and work the tape deck. These mechanical duties alone are so much more interesting than working the front desk. I came to LA to be an editor, not a receptionist.
Later on in the week, Mark asks me to reorganize their tapes by client. That takes me 2-3 days. Picture in your head a naïve, bewildered intern sitting in a room surrounded by stacks and stacks of tapes. They had a lot of tapes. Most of the tapes were just kept in cardboard banker’s boxes. Some others kept on shelves and in their vault. I begin secret plans in my head on how I could improve tape storage. I conquer the tapes. I make organized stacks by client. And give them to Mark bit by bit as he backs them up and makes master reels for them. Intern: 1, Tapes: 0.
