When I came into the summer, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting from an internship with Galileo Media Arts. Would it be mostly camera experience, pre-production, post production? It ended up consisting of all the above. During my summer internship, I got an in depth look into everything that is required for a comprehensive pre-production booklet. One of the most interesting facets of pre-production was the casting, as well as finding production assistants and makeup artists for out of town shoots. By looking through people’s profiles and thinking critically about each person’s resume, I learned a lot about how I would have to present myself when I look for a job in the coming years.
At the end of the summer, we combined all the skills we had learned by making our own short horror film that dealt with the concept of insomnia. The shoot ended up being approximately nine hours spanning over two days (not including setup). All that footage was compressed and put together into a three and a half minute film.
With all that time dedicated to shooting, I really learned the importance of planning our time down to individual shots, in order to maximize effectiveness. We were also able to work with a variety of Galileo’s equipment, and worked together to create a comprehensive equipment list of everything we would need for the film shoot.
Because of all the pre-production experience we had gained over the summer working with Galileo, we knew so much about the importance of organization and our film shoot went very smoothly.
When working on post production, we spent a lot more time making sure the music was perfectly edited than I thought we would have to. Our film was a horror film, so the music ended up being an extremely integral part in creating the mood and the setting of the film. However, I did feel prepared to edit music, and edit film around music, because of the experience I had previously had at Galileo editing music in ProTools.
We were given a project where we had to take one song, around two minutes, and edit it down into three different songs, a fifteen second piece, a thirty second piece, and a one minute piece. This skill came in handy when trying to fit certain songs into different scenes in our films, and taking the parts of the songs that we liked and splicing them together.
All in all, this summer I had a comprehensive look at what goes into making a video piece from start to finish, including motion graphics, sound, and even just the importance of organization. I know I will continue to use these skills as I continue on in my perusal of a film career. Since the shoot was at my house, we also had some fun with the lighting and let my pet gecko, Beefcake, explore the set as well so we could get some glamour shots of him!
