Walking Along

Hello everyone! My goodness it has been quite some time since I last wrote a blog post. A mixture of me wrapping up my job with Audience in October and the holidays put my update stream on hold. But I am back now and have some great news!

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As of January, I am currently working as an Assistant Editor with Reel FX on the animated feature film, Ugly Dolls. I've never worked outside of Southern California for a job, and getting to come out to Dallas has been a wonderful change of pace. Even though I've really only just begun with the Reel FX team, I've greatly enjoyed the camaraderie they share. They're a very encouraging bunch who love their work as much as they love their Texas barbecue (the pulled pork here is amazing!). It's been such a blessing to not only be working again, but to be a part of a team that truly wants each other to succeed.

Though I can't say much about the project itself, I can say that I've had the opportunity to cut more sequences for the editors. In addition, I've created custom watermarks for us to use for exports. After seeing how many titles we were having to render out each time we did an export, I decided to research custom AVID watermark creation. I eventually created unique bin views with custom columns that we could fill out. The watermarks directly reference these columns and update with the appropriate information in real time, allowing us to make a quick changes to any text without bloating our renders drive.

I am truly excited to see where things go and I thank God each day for blessing me with a position that fills me with great joy each time I come in for a new day of work.

A Sweet, Sweet Sound

One of the projects the team I'm working with took part in was creating a makeshift sound booth. Being that our production is working in a warehouse, we tended to get a lot of reverb whenever we recorded our scratch dialogue. As such, me, my 1st Assistant Editor, and our coordinator banded together to create a booth.

After throwing around a few ideas on how to craft it, we settled on making a 10'x10'x10' metal pipe cube covered in moving blankets. Excited to begin, we headed to Home Depot; a place we'd end up making more trips to than we would've liked over the next few weeks. With us being more versed in film and not DIY construction, we ran into some bumps in the road, including buying incorrect pipe fittings, misjudging exactly how high 10 feet truly was, and miscalculating the number of blankets we needed to cover the gigantic cube. However, after a lot of sweat, tears, and driving around town, we finally finished our beautiful cube.

Aside from the light chemical smell the blankets permeate the air with (don't worry, we've been airing it out and using Febreze), the cube has made a huge difference! Before we had our "booth" we had to be very cautious whenever we recorded. We couldn't bump the levels up too high and our editors weren't too thrilled with the nearly unusable, echoing scratch that resulted whenever our actors yelled too loud. Now when we record, you would've thought we were in a real booth! The sound is crisp and clear, with us only having to pause every so often when a particularly loud motorcycle plows down the street next to us.

I'm quite proud of our booth, loving dubbed "The Cube" by our production. Though our resources may be limited, our team continues to amaze me with their resourcefulness whenever a need arises.

(P.S. I would've posted a picture, but I wanted to err on the safe side since we're sharing the space with another company.)

Tinkering Away

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've begun working at ON Animation Studios as a 2nd Assistant Editor on an animated feature film. With starting any new job, it comes with it's own share of challenges that continue to beat the dents out of you.

Having worked in Television promos at my previous job, it was a big change of pace jumping back into the animated feature world that I had experienced at Pixar. Thankfully, because my Pixar mentors shaped the Editorial workflow for the film I'm working on, I was able to hit the grown running on tasks such as dialogue processing and recording with ease. However, learning how much Editors rely on their Assistants has been a rather eye-opening experience.

At Pilot, our Editors cut short-form pieces, which meant that if they ever needed any additional material or aid with their edits, it was in the form of me bringing in a piece of media here or there for them. This was the case as I would always organize and ingest all the media needed for the project before the editor even arrived at our offices. Pilot had this structure in place as I was often juggling the Post of multiple projects, and the speed of Television production was extremely brisk.

Working on a feature, I've had to learn to think quickly on my feet and in the moment while the Editor is cutting. For example, one day I was processing some dialogue, when suddenly one of our Editors asked me to get her a certain line that I hadn't marked up yet. While I wasn't too far off from processing the requested line, I switched gears to get it to them, as the dialogue I was currently working on was for storyboards that hadn't been delivered yet. Promo multi-tasking tends to be on a single project by project basis, while feature multi-tasking concerns itself with the larger picture.

While less of a lesson, because my team and I were in a bit of a crunch recently, the Editors actually let me cut a few boards, sound effects, and dialogue. I had no idea that the Editors would actually hand off some of their work to their Assistants, but in hindsight, it makes sense. An Assistant Editor is there to pick up any slack and help ease the Editor's burden. The willingness to be ready to lend a hand at all times is necessary for Assistants as it shows the ability to be flexible under pressure and be an active team member.

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.

A Look Back

I'm a bit late, but happy 2016! I didn't realize just how fast 2015 passed me by until I pieced together my annual "Second a Day" video. I always enjoy cutting it since I'm able to take a trip down memory lane and reflect upon the various events from the past year. To think, just a year ago I was finishing up my AVID Certification course and preparing for the conclusion of Senior Thesis!

Flash-forward to present day. Now 8 months into working at Pilot, I feel that I've finally hit my groove. Heading deliveries and running freelancers through orientation no longer overwhelms me like it once did. I've come to realize the importance of strong communication, as well as taking initiative when you see a need. My confidence in AVID and Final Cut has been strengthened, allowing me to become more efficient in my work through the discovery of new shortcuts.

I look forward to the opportunities 2016 presents, and trust that God will continue shape and challenge me each day. This year's "Second a Day" is going to be wild!

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!