AliVega video editing internship

My internship at AliVega was an excellent learning experience. I got three months of training to sharpen my Final Cut Pro skills, not to mention the camera work, on-site video shooting, photo lighting setups, and - here's the fun part - data entry. Just kidding about that last part. But honestly, Alicia is a fabulous boss, and I got a lot of great instruction working for her.

Here's some of the stuff I did while interning at Alivega:

Toby Guilette (AKA Endurance Guy) is a steady customer of ours. He's a sponsored athlete, and Alicia has done several event coverage videos following races and marathons he's been in. I got to do a lot of the initial editing on this video, where he did not one, but two laps around the Grand Canyon. He's a bit monotone, but if you skip forward to 1:50-2:06, you get to hear him talk about how he puked. I did the initial edit - meaning lots of audio work, cutting out several minutes worth of "ums" and "ers." I also did the fun little bit of text that fades in during the intro.

I also worked on a series of videos for Ladies Who Launch - an organization that helps business women network, take classes, and build entrepreneurial skills.  I did most of the video and audio editing, as well as the graphic design for the lower thirds and the intro and outro pages. This is one of ________ that I worked on.

More here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf-gKhBbwdE




By far the most intimidating day at my internship was my first day doing camera work. It wasn't the camera that was daunting, no, it was the setting. Alicia had me accompany her to a Christmas party for Ladies Who Launch, where we were supposed to be creating a series of brief videos on interpersonal networking and how it pertained to business owners. Gold walls and marble floors, fancy hors d'oeuvres, lots of middle-aged women in expensive clothes, and me - the intern with the wee video camera. It was unsettling at first, but after seeing how nervous these previously intimidating women were in front of the camera, acting the part of a businesswoman's assistant became much easier.

I was the camera operator on all ten videos, but these three are the ones that I also edited:

Demo Reel

Reels like this have a different work flow than most editing projects. I started with a collection of clips and a song to set them to. Simple enough, but the audio clip was about two minutes longer than the total time on the video clips. It took about ninety minutes to edit the audio clip down to exactly a minute. It was a very repetitive song, and simply cutting it off at sixty seconds would have made it sound very dull. Rather, I divided the song up by the beats and cut out sections that were too long or too repetitious. The trance element made it a little harder to join snippets of the music together, but it was doable.

The clips themselves were organized in order of technical mastery, with a few liberties taken here and there. The clip with dialogue was initially going to be one of the first animations shown, since it is a more impressive piece than some of the others. In the end, however, it was more important to put this clip at a low point in the song, so that the music would not overpower the dialogue.

Working with still frames in Final Cut Pro

This project was really different than most of the videos I've worked on. Rather than chopping up and reassembling a collection of video clips, I had to import a folder of individual Jpegs into final cut. Still images import as single frames, so this entire video started out as about three seconds long, and I ended up manipulating the timing on each individual frame until they matched up with both the storyboards and the music (which I also edited).  It was a different kind of project with a very different workflow, but I loved it. 

One of my first editing tests - A trailer for What Dreams May Come. Fabulous movie, by the way. Very artsy.

Step one was, of course, to watch the movie. I picked out scenes that were particularly dramatic or beautiful, and dialogue that told enough of the story to make a good trailer without giving away the ending. This part was really tough, because I could only use dialogue that didn't have a background track that would interfere with the trailer music.

Step two was to capture these key scenes onto the computer. This involved a complicated little electronic setup between an old TV shaped like a cinder block, and a VCR. Yes, you heard me, a VCR. Straight from the 90's. 

Step three was to lay the scenes down over the music. This was a very rough cut of the trailer, with off timing and jarring audio. A couple hours of moving frames around and tweaking sound levels, and a movie trailer was born.