Pergamon Internship Blog

I haven’t done much internship stuff this week. It’s all been working on my final project. I have been brainstorming how I want to do my rough cut. I was thinking about making something with titles and info and stuff but I don’t know how well that would work. I don’t know. I am planning on going into the MML today and later this week to work on it and see what I can do.

By the way, the installation will be in COM 209, 1-6pm The 9th (Tuesday) and 2-7pm the 10th Wednesday. Be there! It will be AWESOME!

This week I finished up the last few hours of the China footage. YESSSS! I now need to work on making a short cut of things I thought were nice, I am not sure how I will go about doing this but I’ll find a way. I also need to find out when I will be meeting with Ann for the last time this quarter  and I need to find out what she needs to do so that I can get credit. Lots of work to do!

Last weekend I met with Ann and we talked about different ways I could speed up my workflow. After messing around with several different programs like MacDrive and TransMac, which let PCs read Mac formatted drives, and neither of them really working as well as they should, I finally sucked it up and took the trip to the MML. Wow. I should definitely have taken advantage of this earlier. It was well worth the trip as I got through about 20 bins in the first 4 hours and then through another 10 or so when I went back for another 3 hours on Thursday. I now only have about 2 bins left, with the exception of a few that I need to ask Ann about. I should definitely be able to finish up within this next week. The descriptions are not as in depth or detailed and I don’t have as many notes about good shots but I think that is ok at this point.

This week was good. I organized everything I have gone through so far and put it into names and some subclips and stuff. I’m pretty proud of my progress.

I met with Ann this weekend. It was nice because we hadn’t met in a few weeks. I showed her some of my work (last quarter and progress so far this quarter) so that she would have a better idea of the stuff that I was doing. We worked on streamlining my reviewing process because right now I am watching these clips in real time on my grilfriends computer instead of at school or something when I can scrub through the shots. We tried to make the project work on their old mac but that sadly didn’t work. I also downloaded a trial version of TransMac which should let me access the mac formatted drive on my PC. I can see the smaller clips but it’s not letting me access the larger ones. I’ll keep trying. Otherwise I guess I’ll have to decide whether it is worth it to haul myself to the MML or to watch stuff in real time. I think the MML might be a good thing to try.

I have hardcore been slacking on this. Sorry, hopefully this will make up for it.

For my in-program Internship I will be reviewing and organizing 60+ hours of footage taken in China about women and one child policy. I will be doing a little bit of background research about one child policy in China, women’s reproductive rights in America and some cursory research in archival footage. I will be reading Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son by Kay Ann Johnson and hopefully Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler. At the end of the quarter I hope to create a short cut using the footage.

At the end of winter quarter my mom told me about a documentary project one of the guys in her MBA program was doing with his wife about the children they had adopted from China. I kind of half asked her if she would ask them if they needed any help on the project and she came back to me telling me that they had said yes and were very excited. I wrote up the contract, met with Ann (my field supervisor) and Mark (the husband) a couple times over spring break where we discussed the project and the internship and I picked up the footage.

The first week I spent going over all the written materials she had given me, I began reading Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son by Kay Ann Johnson, and developing a strategy for getting through the video footage. I decided on a goal of 10 hours of footage or 10 bins a week. That seemed pretty manageable.

Week two I started to bust through the footage but I could already tell that although 10 hours a week would be a little bit ambitious, as long as I kept working, I could get it done. It wouldn’t be a walk in the park but I could do it. By the time I met with Ann the weekend of week three/four I had gone through the first 20 bins of the project. Ann seemed very pleased with how much footage I had gone through. During our meeting we I just asked questions about what the places where and who the people were so that I could actually organize the footage accordingly.

Week four I did next to no work on the internship stuff, it was a well needed production week as I had been slacking a little bit on my own project for Mediaworks.

Week five I began going through the footage again, getting through another few bins (not whole 10 that I was shooting for). I had been thinking about going down to Portland that weekend to visit with Ann again but she said it would be fine if we didn’t meet since I pretty much had most of my questions answered so far. I just needed to start organizing the footage that I had logged so that she could check on my progress on that. That’s where I am right now, I need to start organizing and continue to log, however, I almost feel that I need to finish logging so that I can get a feel for what is in the footage before I start organizing. I’ll give the organizing a shot and see how it goes in terms of time commitment and material.

As for what I have been learning from these activities, the biggest thing I am learning is not about the topic of one-child policy or anything, but instead I have been leaning from my experiences with time management and working with a “client” and huge amounts of footage. Like I talked about in my production blog, balancing my own project with the internship and with things that need to be done to stay healthy (like eating and sleeping) has been a HUGE challenge. I am definitely learning from my mistakes as there have been a lot of failures on my part. I have two enormous projects on my plate right now and time management is the only thing that’s going to allow me to finish both of them…and stay sane.

So I have been slacking a little bit on this blog. Sorry. It’s been a crazy few weeks.

As for an update, I have gone through the frist 20 bins (60 or so to go) and have met with Ann once to go over it and double check on who’s who and what’s what. She also went through and let me which bins I can skip all together, like the rest of the crazy resturant lady.

I didn’t review anything last week because of my shooting schedule and work and procession but I should be back on track for my goal of 10 bins a week by the end of this week.

I have contacted Ann to request a meeting with her this weekend so we can go over more of the stuff that I have reviewed and my goal is also have some of the footage actually organized properly so she see how I am doing on that.