Transition

Last Friday was officially my last day with Pilot. It was a bittersweet goodbye as I had grown rather close to my co-workers at both the LA and New York offices.

I have Pilot's Post Supervisor to thank for pushing me to challenge myself to be an independent thinker and troubleshooter. With each network having its own set of unique delivery specs, it forced me to become more observant and thorough, as it was crucial that deliveries followed the post requirements to a 'T.' It was overwhelming at first since it seemed like every network had vastly different specifications, but as I did more and more jobs, I realized they were more similar than I had originally thought, with me only having to make slight changes here and there to adhere to a specific network's guidelines.

The next leg of my career journey began Tuesday of this past week. I am now serving as a 2nd Assistant Editor on an animated feature film with ON Animation Studios. One of my former Pixar mentors approached me about this position, and I thought it would be a great next step as I'd be able to serve as an Assistant Editor in animation editorial. I'm very excited for what these next few months hold (especially since the 1st Assistant Editor is another one of past my Pixar mentors!), and getting to really dig my teeth into this project.

Pilot, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for a fantastic first full time job. It was a great learning experience and a time of growth that improved both my post skills, and confidence in myself. You will be greatly missed.

Driving Along

A few weeks ago, a spot Pilot created for BBC America and Mercedes-Benz called the "Mercedes-Benz Social Adventure" premiered. It was meant to get viewers excited about the new C-Class Coupe through the posts of a group of hand selected Instagramers that captured fun pictures of the car in different areas around Southern California. I acted as Assistant Editor on this piece, and was so thrilled to actually see it be featured on the official Mercedes-Benz USA Facebook page and have it air on television.

The biggest challenge for this project had to be up-rezing for delivery and working with mixed video resolutions. When we shot the spot, the car we used was a dark navy blue. Unfortunately, the footage that Mercedes provided for us to cut with featured a black car. As a result, any shot of the car that we captured had to be color corrected to a matching shade of black. Because of this, I eventually had a mixture of 1080p and 2K shots of the car; some from Mercedes and the rest from our colorists. However, because we were cutting in AVID, the question became how to maintain the resolution of the new car shots. While I could have easily just imported them at a higher resolution such as DNxHD 145, I was worried about the 2K footage looking compressed.

To solve this, I AMA linked the entire sequence back to their high res source files and applied any LUTs and additional color corrections to match the original sequence. My initial course of action was to just export out an EDL and then link up and export the sequence from Da Vinci Resolve. However, the issue came down to having a proper Broadcast Safe Filter to apply to the footage in Resolve. My company uses a custom filter created in AVID to throw on top of all of our deliveries. With this in mind, I knew that even if I exported out of Resolve, I'd have to bring the file back into AVID to apply the filter. Being pressed for time, I was unable to work with my Post Supervisor to create a new filter in Resolve. As a result, I settled on over cutting the sequence with AMA linked HighRes footage. It did take a while, and I'll admit it didn't feel super efficient, but it allowed the spot to be delivered on time and at the best resolution possible.

This spot was a fantastic group effort and I'm honored to have been a part of it. Hope you enjoy watching the final product!

Anniversary

It's here! At last I have made it to one year with Pilot. I know in a previous post I said that I had started on June 15th, but, much to my amusement, only a few days after I posted that did I find out that my start date had been bumped up to June 9th. Funny how life works.

This past year can be summed up into one word: learning. Fresh out of college with some internships and a degree under my belt, I thought I was aware of and could take on anything the working world threw my way. Needless to say this was wishful thinking, and I was in for a whirlwind year that would mold my skills as an Assistant Editor and a team player.

From day one, I was given the task of mastering our company's post workflow and becoming aware of how to aid our freelance editors with any issues that might come up. Our company has two branches, one in Marina Del Rey and the other in New York, with the majority of the company at the latter. Being the only post person at our West Coast branch, I quickly learned that I couldn't be a passive player, turning to my post colleagues to save me when things got hairy. This became especially apparent the first time I ran into issues with a digital file delivery.

In the days after my mishap, I swore to myself to never have that happen again. As a result, whenever we got a new job from a client, I immediately read up on and studied their delivery specs, asking questions about any sections that were confusing to me, even creating checklists of all the elements that needed to be uploaded. With the addition of mapping out more hotkeys to speed along my editorial process, new jobs became less scary and more of a puzzle that just needed the proper time to find the solution. Final deliveries to clients are already stressful enough, and if I can avoid any added stress just by being prepared, I'll take it.

Even writing emails, of all things, is not as daunting. When I started out, I tended to be very wordy, sometimes even asking questions I already knew the answer to. After much trial and error, and looking at how my coworkers wrote to clients, I figured out how to be direct with my inquiries, even learning the polite way to correct clients if there was a misunderstanding. With so many emails being sent and received every day, quick and concise message are a godsend.

Finally, this job has coaxed me out of my comfort zone. I'm more on the quiet side, and working at the Marina Del Rey office has had me make phone calls to various companies to place orders or ask questions, as well as communicate with shoot crews and freelance editors that enter Pilot for the first time. It was a bit of work to push myself to do so, but I'm so glad I did and my confidence has grown because of it.

Thank you Pilot for an amazing year, and I look forward to what the future has in store.

Application

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a shoot for one of the promos Pilot is going to be editing. The Creative Director on the project suggested I come along to see what the company does for these shoots. So, on an early Friday morning in April, I made the trek over to set.

The interesting thing about this particular shoot was that we were filming in the same place that the series we were making the promos for was shooting. During the show's shoot downtime, the talent would come over to our set for us to interview them.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the promo and series sets were run just like the ones I had been on at Dodge. Everything from the call sheets, to the communication the crew members had with one another, nearly matched that of the student film shoots I had been on. While things did get a bit behind schedule, just as Chapman sets were wont to, everyone remained patient and cooperative, working to stay helpful and positive through it all.

It got me thinking of how well Dodge did in fact prepare its students for the real world of film production. While set could not compare to my preferred home of the editing suite, being there allowed me to experience the realization of the Producing team's plans, as well as the camaraderie of the camera team. Dodge drilled into us from day one the importance of teamwork, and remembering that creating films was a group effort.

Even though I ended up taking a post route versus a physical production one, it's comforting to know that my Alma Mater taught me well and gave me a rounded education that will continue to aid me in my field of work for years to come.

Piece by Piece

Photo Credit: Karina McBeth

My sister and I have recently started collaborating on a webseries called, AOI. At the moment, it is slated to consist of a series of 13 animatic "episodes," with my sister providing the storyboards, and me doing the editing and sound design.

After creating and tweaking a rough outline of the story, my sister began boarding Episode 1. Once she completed her first pass, she handed the storyboards over to me to start editing in AVID. As I went through the cut, I made Editorial suggestions to my sister, such as removing whole scenes and adding in beats to help move the story along. My sister is currently working on revisions for Episode 1 as well as the storyboards for Episode 2. I will continue to post updates about our progress as the months go on. If you want daily updates about AOI however, you can also check out my sister's blog.

This week I was also added to PILOT's official website. I've been with the company for a good few months now, and am greatly enjoying it there. I am thankful for the challenges that have come my way, being stretched in my skills as an Assistant Editor and learning to be more observant in my work. Be sure to check out the rest of the team on the website as well. They're a fun bunch who are a joy to work with each day.

Blastoff

  

Hard to believe it's been almost a whole month since I finished up my last year at Chapman University. So much has been packed into these past few weeks as I've started to enter the workforce. I've traveled to New York, secured a full time position in Post Production, and received my first feature credit as Editorial Intern on Pixar's Inside Out. It's both exhilarating as well as scary to reflect on how quickly this all happened, but I look forward to what this next year of adult life brings. I've got much to learn, and I'm stoked for the growth I experience as an Assistant Editor as well as an employee. 3-2-1 let's go!