Aurora Productions Internship Report I have to say that overall I enjoyed my internship at Aurora Productions. Rich, the boss, was very nice as was his secretary Rachel and Lou, the editor. This was the staff that was usually there every Thursday when I went there. They were all fun to work with and they helped me out since before I came there I pretty much had no previous experience in production. I started learning right from the first day of the internship when I went on a shoot with them. Everything seemed so complicated to hook up and operate but by the last shoot I went on things seemed a lot simpler than they did that first day.
One of the only complaints I have about the whole thing was the drive out to Huntington. When I went on shoots that were early in the morning I could make it out there in 40 minutes. On the days I was there at 9 though were a little rougher. If I left my house at 8 I could get there around 9, sometimes as late as 9:30. One day was horrible and I didn't get there until 10:00. I usually got on the LIE by house at Exit 19 and took it to Exit 49 then take Route 110 to the Northern State and take that until Exit 42. I used to take the Grand Central from Queens but I was hitting too much traffic at the Clearview Expressway and Cross Island Parkway exits. Even though the LIE had a lot of traffic it moved faster than the traffic on the LIE. Plus the Grand Central/Northern State curves too much and runs south of the LIE but eventually crosses it by the Suffolk border and goes north. I found I was losing more time taking the Grand Central/Northern State. I couldn't imagine having to go out there everyday, once a week for me was a tiring enough.
The office was a nice place to work in. It wasn't that huge but they have all the room they need. There's Rich's office, Rachel's office, 2 edit rooms, one much bigger than the other, an equipment room, dub room and a screening room. The bigger edit room is where Lou edits all the projects he's working on. Clients also come in sometimes to sit in on the edit and observe. When the project is finished they come to watch it in the screening room. I was allowed to use the smaller edit room to learn on the Avid. I didn't really get to edit anything besides the tutorial that it comes with. I read over the manual before I first started to use then when I felt I was familiar enough with it I began to use it. Lou helped me out and answered any questions I had about the Avid. I really enjoyed editing on the Avid. Even though I didn't do anything besides the tutorial it was cool to work with. The task was to make a PSA for rainforests. In the book it gave instructions on what shots to use and everything but I disregarded it and made my own using what shots I wanted to and it came out really good. I also sat in with Lou a couple times and watched him edit and I thought it was really cool. He had a lot more footage to deal with than I did but I can see how he can sit in that edit room all day. Once you start editing something you don't want to stop until it looks the way you want it. I experienced that when I was doing the tutorial and even when I was editing my film for film production last week.
The last two weeks of the internship were fun because we went on two interesting shoots. On April 19th we went to The Ronald McDonald house in New Hyde Park to film a segment for a video series. Barbara Sinatra, Frank's wife, was there to give the speech. I actually didn't know of her before I actually saw her but it was cool to work with the wife of someone who was extremely famous. I also met this guy named Chad Everett who was also. I knew I saw him before in 1998 remake of Psycho but I wasn't sure. When I came home and popped it in my DVD player and sure enough it was him. He played the cowboy guy whose money gets stolen by Crane. Too bad I didn't know it was him when I was there, I could've impressed since not too many people have seen that movie. It took us about an hour to get everything set up and then what we finally filmed only lasted about 20 minutes. When you're behind the scenes you realize how much work is being done back there and learn to appreciate.
Then last week, April 26th, we went on a shoot at Long Beach Medical Center in Long Beach. The hospital is in a really nice location, which is right on the water. The inside of the hospital is nothing great but its not as bad as I'm sure some hospitals are. All they were filming were cutaways for a promotional video for the hospital. Out of the three shoots I went on with them this was the one I was most involved with. I pushed the bin with the equipment around from place to place and helped set up a lot of the stuff such as the lights and connecting the camera to the monitor and all that stuff. Everything was going smoothly until a problem occurred with the camera. It just stopped working all of a sudden (No I didn't touch the camera at all!). At first they thought the battery was dead so we put on one of the backup batteries. That didn't work either. The camera had power since the light on it was working but nothing on the deck was working and the deck pretty much controls everything. Finally they just figured that a fuse inside that camera had blown but there was a problem. We only had one camera with us! So Rich had to Rachel up back at the office and she had to bring the other camera from Huntington down to Long Beach. That probably set us back an hour or so but it wasn't too bad. The camera stopped working just as they had got a little girl to lie in a hospital bed pretending she was sick and her father comes to cheer her up. Since they didn't want upset her and tell her she couldn't be in it now that camera was broken they pretended it was working and shot her anyway. Everything went good after Rachel brought the other camera and they actually got the girl and her father to come back and redo the scene. It was a fun day though.
I'm sorry that I didn't get to go on more shoots with them. Since I was only able to go there on Thursdays, it limited the amount of shoots I could go on. I could've gone on two more than I did but I missed one due to being sick and another because we had that snowstorm in the beginning of March and the shoot was cancelled. I enjoyed the three shoots I did go on with them though because you learn a lot about how all the field production equipment works and what gets connected to what. It was much better than being in the office. A day in the office usually consisted of me filing tapes, organizing storage cabinets or delivering or picking up things for Rich. I even went with Lou twice up to New Jersey to deliver old equipment they were selling. It sounds funny but just by loading all that equipment into the van familiarized me more with the recording equipment in the office.
In closing I'd like to say once again that I enjoyed my time at Aurora Productions. Nice people, nice place to work and it's a good learning experience. I think that everyone should do at least one internship during his or her time in college. You learn so much more about how the production world works and you need that knowledge before you go out into this business.