My Last Week

The last week of my internship with CNAM was probably my favorite week on the job (and possibly my favorite week in NYC). I got to work the entire time on AVID, creating and perfecting a short 2-minute trailer for CNAM’s video game.

When I first started working with AVID, I really didn’t like it. To me there seemed to be more buttons that necessary and more steps than needed to complete a simple job like delete video clips on the timeline. And for the first few days, I thought AVID was completely missing some really important functions, because I couldn’t find the function in the giant How To book. So I spent a painful couple of days doing a lot of editing step by step before Peter showed me how to do things the easy way (like move entire trips of video clips on the timeline by typing in numbers). But once I started to figure things out, once I could move around the program with relative ease, I decided that perhaps AVID wasn’t so bad after all. I think the frustration and dislike came with not understanding the program (a life lesson?), so once I gained familiarity with the keys, etc, I started to like it. Maybe not more than Final Cut, since I still think Final Cut is more user-friendly. I also know that my short week and a half working with AVID allowed me to only scratch the surface of the program… it is way to beautifully complex for me to have figured it all out.

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I am so grateful that Louis gave me the opportunity to work on AVID. And the fact that he gave me an actual project that he was relying on me to complete made me feel very honored.

My project was to make a short trailer or preview of what the game is like for potential investors and people who are interested in the game. So I had to find a way to package all the fun of the game into one short sequence. Talk about pressure. Once I figured out the direction I wanted to go with the trailer (with help from Allen and Chase, the new intern), it was relatively to create. Contrary to most of my creative endeavors, the imagining was the difficult part and the execution the easy part.

On Wednesday, I thought I had a finished version, so I brought in Louis, Andy and Peter to see what I had done. They were very nice, but they were also full of criticism and other ideas. At first it was a bit nerve-wracking to listen to them talk about my work like that, but then I remembered something Allen had told me earlier on in the internship. You have to have a thick skin in this business. If you don’t, you wont survive.

But by Friday, after the fourth or fifth final version I had shown the three guys, they finally decided it was complete, and while I was there, they burned the DVD and sent it off in the mail. Now, that completely surprised me. I had completely expected them to wait until I had left on Monday and then go through and polish up my work to what they wanted it to be. But the fact that they mailed off to someone the trailer that I had created (without messing with it first) made me feel honored and very grateful that they had given me a responsibility like that. I am so grateful that my internship wasn’t just about filing papers and getting coffee (although I did some of both), and that the guys at CNAM allowed me to gain experience working on a real project with AVID. Not only was it all a bunch of fun, but this is going to look great on my resume.