internship, march

This week was a bit more tedious at my internship. The director of the organization needed some old footage to be digitized and edited, a little, so it could be further worked on. At first glance it seemed like this documentary was finished, but now that I think about it, I wonder if the filmmakers are going to go back and try to find the people that they once documented. I did over hear the director speculating about trying to get in contact with that family, again. This family lived in Macedonia approximately 10 years ago by a group of rebels. They became refugees; some of the refugees survived, some traveled and some died. This one particular family became refugees in a camp in an area in Kosovo. These families, of course, did not speak any english. My job was to first digitize all of the video that they had; there were 5 videos given to me and I had to digitize all of them; each video being about an hour long. After digitizing them, I had to keep a track of everything (visually) that happened. So, if there were a large group of people walking in line to a water well or if a kid was playing by himself and crying in a relatively deserted area, I had to track it. That task, itself took hours to do. After that I had another job to do. I had to locate the beginning and the end of whenever one of the foreign refugees would be interviewed. I then made markers and put those at the start and end points. With those marked points I edited out those specific sections and created a new file with only those sections in it. So, I put fade in and out effects on each sections, leaving 2 seconds of blank filler space at the beginning and end of each section and then digitized the whole video, so it could be sent off to a translator.

Internship

Last week I went to my internship on Tuesday and Thursday. The entire week was both hectic and boring. The problem was for everyone else excluding myself and another intern it was relatively boring. The film that the organization is trying to finish (at the time) was due to their funders on Thursday. So, with that being said everyone that worked there was heavily occupied with the parts of the project that they had to finish in a day or two. The computer that I usually use to edit their video was being used by another worker to finalize a corporate video, so I was unable to do what I usually do there. So, for that entire week I spent my time further learning how to use their programs. I practiced using the programs by using some of their old and unused video, text and audio. I also watched the footage of the film that is soon to be due and I had a fairly in depth discussion with the video editor about the effectiveness of the film, permission and borrowing issues, the goal of the film, studio equipment and paths to take to be successful filmmaker.

I am very much looking forward to doing some other work for this upcoming week.