Last Weekend in Rapid City

So this was my last weekend here. I'll be sticking around for a few more days to cram in a bit more on-location experience with the internship, then I'll be heading back down to Arkansas for the rest of the summer. Tomorrow will be a commercial shoot, then we'll start editing on Tuesday. After that, the shooting schedule for the second commercial will determine if I stay or not. If we're able to schedule it fairly quickly, like for Wednesday or even maybe Thursday, I'll stay around for that one. Otherwise, I'll be one my way come Wednesday. Tomorrow should be fun. The basic idea for a series of three commercials is people who have the worst jobs in the world, and the commercials are advertising online business classes with a university in South Dakota, and the idea is that by taking online classes and getting a degree, you can get out of your terrible job. The one we're shooting tomorrow is basically a guy whose job is being a human piñata. So we're going to try and hang him from a swing in a backyard and have a bunch of little kids in birthday party hats run at him with wiffle bats. :-)

This weekend was fairly relaxing, and I also got in some solo shooting experience. There's a volunteer building project going on just outside of town. Basically, they're building a playground in seven days, using only volunteer workers and donated materials and equipment. Our company donated a website for the organization that's in charge of the whole thing, and they sent me over there Friday morning and Saturday afternoon to get some still images and some video footage of the ongoing construction work. So that was pretty fun. It was nice to be trusted with shooting something on my own, even if it's a relatively minor project, and one that's very easy to do.

In other news, I've been digging deeper into After Effects, doing some tutorials and things like that when I'm not busy with internship work. I'm loving this program more and more every time I learn something new. I'm at the point right now where I can do basic stuff relatively quickly and easily, and I sort of have a feel for how some of the more advanced things are done, but I'm still just barely scratching the surface. Hopefully next semester I'll be able to get my hands on some books and get some cool stuff done, maybe even YouTube or Vimeo-worthy, or, God willing, demo reel-worthy.