DAY 10 - Kings of Halloween

Sitting here at the office on Day 11 with Day 10 not even written up has me feeling a bit out of sorts.  To prevent my brain from jumbling days up, I'm going to try to bang out this entry before the ball begins barreling down the hill that is Monday.

My alarm decided to take a day off on Friday so I woke up with the sun uncomfortably blaring in my eyes and the realization that it was almost 9:00 am!  Not too incredibly late but it upset me all the same.  After all was said and done I got into the office at about 11:30 am, just in time to be invited to lunch at the Shake Shack with Ryan Nugent, Justin Johnson (whose proper title is "Creative Services Lead" and who I made promos for at the beginning of this internship) and Daniel Delaney, the host of VendrTV.  I learned that, according to Justin, I am the "superstar intern".  Props for me.  Things were definitely discussed at the luncheon that were fun to listen in on, details of which are foggy and unobtainable with all the office chatter buzzing in my brain.  One detail I don't forget, though, was spotting Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Yeah, this guy.

There was major confusion regarding the videos downloaded for the 60 Second Horror Short Contest. Apparently the other intern watching submissions, Tracey, downloaded many of the same videos I did, but didn't rename them or place them in the proper folders. Just downloaded, watched, and moved on. While Ryan and I were trying to figure out how to organize and make sense of it, I couldn't help but be eternally grateful for my anal desire for order and organization. Listen to your Mom and Dad, kids. Start young and clean your room because someday, all that "structure" leads to a grand work ethic.  Anyway, silly life lessons aside, seeing my logically separated folders in comparison to the jumbled videos with abstract letter-and-number titles was a highlight of the day.  In the end, Ryan just reasoned that he would talk to Tracey when she came in on Tuesday.  (Why did I just relay all of that?  As noted, my brain is jumbled.)

The meat and potatoes of my day came when Erik IMed me asking if I could cut together a trailer for the test film, "Kings of Halloween", that would be inserted into the Backyard FX episode airing on Monday.  "Why of course!"  I was sent a 20-25 second clip and asked to shrink it to ten seconds, using music and graphics to really entice the audience.  After a short time I cut together what I could, running at almost exactly ten seconds with elementary graphics and a doctored music track taken from the Test Film itself.  Erik watched it and laughed, seeming pleased by what I had done up to that point. 

And then the "master" went to work.  Erik reached into the computer and pulled our sound effects and composite explosions, added them to witty, keyframed titles and utilized some of his favorite motion effects to make the trailer pop with life and "gangsta" intensity.  Watching it really did make me want to see the whole Test Film and I already had seen it twice before!  Being able to look over his shoulder, throwing in my own opinions here and there, was, in laymen's terms, awesome and I learned a great deal from just that hour or so of observation.  Final Cut Pro has a lot of tricks I have yet to find the bags of.  (As much as I want to say it made me run home, open up my version of Final Cut and test them all out, my computer's processor would choke on the first attempt at a imported explosion from Det Films.)  There's a greater lesson in all this, one that applies to the mission statement, but I can't really find it at the moment.  Office chatter is blamed once again.

Elaborations may come?  I feel like I say that too often and then never come back to the old entires.  Seriously, I'm trying.