Week Eight at NP

Happy August everyone! We're halfway through the summer already! It really has been amazing so far. Week Eight of my internship at New Perspective Productions was a week of shoots which led to other opportunities, which I will detail below. Here, then, is Week Eight.

7/28 - Tuesday

To start the week out, I went to a shoot at the Westin Hotel and Convention Center in downtown Pittsburgh with Mike H. and his sound colleague Chris. Our job was to interview representatives from various energy companies during the conference. Mike operated the HVX100 P2 camera, Chris mixed and operated the boom, and I was responsible for a small portable light on a light stand which could be powered with a battery.

It was also my job to run up to the hotel room (where our other equipment was and where another colleague of New Perspective’s, Bill, sat editing our footage as it came in) and bring another battery if we needed it. The light was very easy to move around, without having to worry about finding an electrical outlet and long cables. The battery was about the size of a Trimpack battery, with a small cord that came out and connected to the cord of the small light. I had never worked with that kind of battery or light before (being used to big Arri lights) but it was very simple to use. It also had a daylight filter attached to it, which could be flipped down onto the light if we were ever near a window. With help from the producer, who was getting people to be a part of the video, we interviewed 6 representatives about their role at the conference and what they thought about being in Pittsburgh. We occasionally took P2 cards up to hotel room where Bill was editing so that he could edit on the fly. It was a very organized system. We all had a great lunch together which the hotel provided for the conference. The shoot went very smoothly.

A note about interpersonal relations on set: as a filmmaker, no matter what your individual role is on set, it is your job (along with everyone else) to maintain as positive an attitude as possible with all you encounter, even if one or more of the people you are working with are not. There are always going to be people you work with whom you may not like. Some people can be grumpy, annoying, or downright rude, but that doesn’t mean you should be the same. It never leads to anything good; plus, it takes away from the work you should be doing. It’s a common phrase, but sometimes, you just have to ‘smile and nod.’ I’m not saying you should allow yourself to be walked all over; if someone crosses that invisible line, let them know, but in a proactive, professional manner. Keep the bigger picture in mind. Think of what the greater project means to you, and all those people you enjoy working with who are depending on you to do a great job. As long as you maintain a positive, hard-working attitude, committed to what you are there to do, the people around you will notice and you will be the person they call for the next project.

7/29 - Wednesday

Wednesday delivered a fun day in the form of another shoot. Call time was 8:00 am at WQED Studios in Oakland for a reality show pilot episode involving 6 teenagers. Mark from NP was my supervisor for the day. I mainly observed everyone’s roles and workflows throughout the day, occasionally asking questions. At times, I held a larger role. The first thing we shot with the WQED staff was a series of interviews with each of the students in the show against a green screen. I helped with some of the interview questions. I also went to get things the crew needed.


Later on, I assisted the sound mixer on one of the sets. We both wore headphones, which were connected to a large mixing board. When we started, I could hear a low-frequency buzz that he couldn't. When I let him know about it, he asked one of the other WQED sound designers to have a listen, and he could hear it too. It wasn’t until he turned the headphone monitor knob all the way up that he started to hear the buzz. What we couldn’t figure out was whether the buzz was being recorded or if it was just how our headphones were connected to the mixing board. Nonetheless, he found a way to change the connection to reduce the buzz; I gave him feedback with the headphones while he made adjustments. Being a Sound Design minor at SCAD, it felt good to know that I had had a direct impact on the quality of the sound for a pilot TV show episode.


It rained often and hard, and I frequently had to run out in it since we were sometimes shooting outside in an 18-wheeler truck. During a break, I met an old externship supervisor of mine (and the host of ‘On Q’ on WQED), Chris Moore. I had participated in his one-week intensive externship, the Frank Bolden Urban Journalism Workshop, during high school in 2006, with a focus in Photography. I was already passionate about film at the time. The week had been a rewarding and memorable experience. All 3 of my news articles and a couple of my photographs were featured in the workshop’s section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Mr. Moore and I quickly caught up on the past 3 years (no easy feat), and we continued our work at the studio. I ran into him again as we were wrapping up the shoot. The 2009 Journalism Workshop at Point Park University was starting the coming weekend, and he decided to invite me to speak as an alumna of the program at the alumni panel discussion to help inspire this year’s class of externship students. I was honored and gladly accepted the invitation to speak that Saturday.

7/30 - Thursday

Back at New Perspective, I took a breather on Thursday from all the shoots. I was given the job of cutting out designs for an entry form that NP had designed. Later, I watched and transcribed footage that was taken during my vacation week. I took notes on the best clips to prepare for the editing process.

Since there were delays in scheduling interviewees who had conflicts with our timetable, there are now two weeks left for editing, with at least one interview to go. It is times like these that make me thankful that we are shooting digitally (knock on wood). There were some format issues with the most recently-shot footage, but those have been resolved now. Due to another shoot on Tuesday (tomorrow), we start editing this Wednesday. Since I’m leading the editing portion of this project, I intend to cover a lot of ground on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, the other interns will take over.

8/1 - Saturday

I just thought I’d note how the alumni panel discussion at the Journalism Workshop at Point Park University went. In two words: incredibly well. I met some old classmates from the 2006 Workshop and networked with some other alumni. When it was my turn to speak, everything came very naturally. It felt very rewarding to have so many students be engaged and fascinated by the work I was doing now, since graduating from the externship. They were particularly interested in SCAD and my film and sound design work.


At one point, Chris Moore decided to pull down the screen in the classroom and have me log onto the main computer so that I could pull up a recently-completed sound design project the students were interested in seeing. Afterwards, many of them were asking for SCAD’s URL and my email address. I could tell that at least 3 of them would be on SCAD’s website that night. It was all very exciting and I was humbled by their enthusiasm and motivation. The whole experience was a nice reminder of how far I have come thus far. And it all occurred because I happened to be on a film shoot at WQED.


If you’re interested, here is that sound design project from last Spring Quarter at Savannah College of Art and Design. It is a 3-minute clip from the film ‘Deep Impact’ with the entire soundtrack redesigned (music, dialogue, and sound effects).