BSA303, Spoon internship ,3-7 July, 2017

Daryl wasn't sure if they'd have anything to do as they don't use 3D animation very often at their ad agency, but he was nice enough to let me come sit in and watch Quentin the motion graphics editor work and Q is letting me try some stuff in Aftereffects.  They're a full-service ad agency which means they shoot, add motion graphics, audio, and edit in-house.  So there is PLENTY for me to learn.

Monday 3 July, 10-5.30 with a lunch break.
Turns out I've met Q before. I did some work for his wife Nicky MacDonald years ago and met them both at a Spoon BBQ. Today He made an ad for a major TV manufacturer and a cleaning products company. The turnover is really fast and clients come in to collaborate with the creative staff (I will find out exactly what Daryl, Natalye and  Christian call themselves). Q does a rough cut and then they'll come in with suggestions and requests. Its a very collaborative process and he mostly uses AE and Photoshop. They use nothing but Macs and reckon most ad agencies are the same. I'll have to get up to speed on soft and hardware if I want to go into advertising. Q let me take a crack at making a 3d object in AE for the TV ad. He had trouble getting it to rotate but managed to come up with another solution after consulting with Daryl. There are always multiple solutions to any problem as long as you know enough tricks in the programs to draw on. They make TVCs for the same clients over and over so there's a big asset collection to refer to or reuse. And new things can be whipped up pretty quickly. Natalye walked Quentin through the changes to a TVC for a cleaning product company that changed it's packaging and needed to show off the new look.

Useful tip of the day: In Photoshop, if you select something with the magic lasso and it doesn't grab enough, you can decrease the tolerance settings to 30% so you don't lose low contrast areas.  Make WIP (work in progress) folders so everybody knows what's in play from day to day.  Jobs come in and go out everyday and without good folder discipline, working would be a nightmare.

Tuesday 10-5.15, with lunch break
Today Quentin made TVCs for oven and fireplace manufacturers, and recipe instruction videos for a national cafe chain.  Q has a very clean folder system and keeps the files on the AE timeline very tidy, too.  Any footage or graphics that have been put into place on the timeline get put away in the composition folders.  I got to press some buttons today!  Ha ha!  I actually pushed too many buttons when Q had me cut apart the footage for the recipe video.  I thought that each step had to have it's own segment to correspond with the text and graphic move, but he only needed the product bookends separated from the making portion of the video.  No harm done.  Cutting it apart also meant Q could size up the footage to 110% to cut off the dark parts of the under table that had gotten in the shot. In the fireplace ad, Q added a parallax effect and made still images look like footage.  It's a brief spot, 15 secs, but the trick was very effective.  First, he masked off the door of the fireplace to reveal footage of a fire burning logs, then he animated the picture to slightly rotate and move forward to make it look like the camera was coming into the room. He added another good move to the spot when he had a cast iron pot "grow" into the from and dropped a "$325" from behind some text.  That masking tool is VERY useful.  The mask behind the text was hot pink so he wouldn't lose it in the background.  He turned it off and locked it in place (or was it the other way around).  I got to make the mask.  I mostly sit next to him and talk to him about what he's doing and occasionally there's something safe to let me try my hand it.  I really appreciate that he's trying to find ways to for me to get some practical experience.  He's offered to let me go off into an editing bay to mess around with AE but right now I reckon I need to see what's possible.
The ad for tvs was okayed by the client so Quentin walked me through the procedure for getting it on air.  Adstream is a company that checks over TVCs to make sure they're legal and of broadcast quality.  Legal means that they're not too loud (in NZ that means -24 hz) and the colours and blacks fall into a certain range.  Each check costs money so Quentin runs the TVC through Blackmagic software and makes adjustments.  Getting it "legal" in the blacks make taking out the corrections he made to the first part of the ad where compression had left the theatre seats "blocky".  There's not much he could do as the footage was badly compressed somewhere in Australia before it got to him.  Adstream will decide if the quality is good enough for play on broadcast television.  When they find problems, they email the agency back so things can be fixed, if possible.  Since the problem came from the client, nothing can be done and it will go on the the network to be played this weekend.  Ads go out fast!

Useful tip of the day:  In the oven ad, the client's logo is surrounded by an oval swirl.  As the logo grows on screen, it changes from the name to the full swirl logo.  Q made this in photoshop by chopping the logo into 3 layers then set up a tracing path mask in AE and got a stroke to follow the path which then revealed the full logo and looked totally animated. Smaller composition groupings can be made within the made composition.  This is useful if you're repeating a set of animations or graphics.

Wednesday 10-5:30, with lunch break
Nicky hired out the editing suite and Quentin today to do a corporate video for a food industry client.  She purchased a template from vb
Nicky asked if I have any graphic design training, which I don't.  Again, if I want to go into advertising, there's a lot of upskilling I'll need to do as turn over is fast and there's no time for researching stuff during the day.  But I DID get to make some graphics after all!  Nicky asked again about my Photoshop skills and said she needed a globe graphic made.  I had a short think while she and Quentin were popping files into the right places and thought about photo collage... and the client's logo uses photos of green beans and blueberries, so I suggested a globe made from fruits and vegetables.  Nicky liked that idea and using a thin white line to outline like the client logo.

Globe graphic that I made for Nicky's corporate video

I also made what made some icons to represent business elements in the presentation.  That required some duplicating a pre-existing graphic and find photos with google image search.  I got to try out Quentin's pen and stroke technique in photoshop but the line I made was too thick.   I was going to retrace the path but Nicky was able to figure out how to fix it eventually.   Nicky had me keep each layer separate AND copy off groups (icon, image and text) and merge the layers into one object, all in the same file.  I can definitely use that in the future to cut down on how many files I have to hunt through to find things.  Quentin said that when you make multiple icons or elements in Photoshop to bring over to AE it's important to stack the layers on top of each other so the editor doesn't have to place each one individually.  It just speeds things up considerably.

Useful tip of the day:  Keep every layer and don't worry about the drive getting full until the drive gets full!  In one PSD, you can keep all your layers AND a combined version of the graphic.  This keeps the overall folder system tidy and makes it easy to lay your hands on what you need.  Also, don't beat around the bush- name files what they are and fully plus put in a date for good measure so you and everybody else can find things again later.

Thursday 8:00-4:30, with lunch break
Today I went with Christian and Daryl to shoot footage for a series of promo spots for a training college.  Daryl is doing a shoot with a skeleton crew to keep costs down for a consultant who can potentially bring in more clients.  They always give clients the choice of having Spoon arrange everything for them (casting, location scouting, storyboards, etc.) or letting the client do most of that for themselves to keep the prices 4 times lower.  The consultant wrote the script (script template: My name is ______ and I study _______.  I want to do ___________  but I don't know how.  (cut to "After") Thanks to ____________college I have the skills to get a high paying job in the __________ industry.), recruited students to be filmed, and scouted locations around the campus.  Daryl and Christian lit a blank wall and placed the students in front of it.  I did some minor powdering for shine, smoothed stray hairs, and put my jackets on people who needed costume changes.  Lol.  That made me wardrobe department for the day.  When we moved from set piece to set piece, I held the boom mike and helped shift gear around.  Daryl did the filming and listened for sound quality and Christian coached the talent and read the lines to them for them to repeat instead of having to memorize.  I'm amazed at how that blank wall looks like a clean white screen in the footage- the people totally pop out.  It was a long day but everybody was very pleased by how it went.  

Christian and Daryl checking out the equipment and setting up for the white wall shots.  

What kind of camera is this?  It certainly looks impressive.

Setting up a shot to look like a logistics and export/import sort of job situation for the man in the hi-vis vest.  

Interns shouldn't be standing around taking selfies, so this was the best I could manage.  Ha ha!

Friday 10-4 with one hour lunch break
I started the day watching Quentin make some time lapses and "boomerangs" of cafe recipe preps that will go on Instagram.  Then he let me practice cutting footage from yesterday in Avid, the Apple editing software.  The keyboard has a special cover that sets out the key shortcuts that work for the program easier to find.  JKL stands for reverse play (J), pause (k), and forward play (L).  Tapping the J and L buttons makes playback faster so you can scroll through the footage until you see the talent talking.  Just before they start, you hit I for in and a bracket pops up on the timeline, then O for out after they finish and b to send the bracketed section down to the timeline.  I got through about 5 of our 7 actors before the next task popped up.  Russ Taylor is animating an ad for Spoon for a rent to own company.  It's done in the style of Bro Town and he uses a Mac, Wacom Cintiq, Flash and After Effects.  He said that he's heard alot about Toonboom but doesn't want to pay that kind of money (yet) when Flash still works so well for him.  I can't argue with that because what he's doing looks really good.  Daryl, Christian and Russ watched the animation, gave feedback and then sent Russ on his way to make adjustments.  The spot needs to be finished for client approval by Monday.  They sent me along with Russ to check out his home work station and to talk more about his process.  He started out in print then moved to digital.  He hasn't had any formal animation training but picked stuff up on the job (he worked for M&C Saatchi Sydney and did banner ads at one point in his career before moving to Auckland) and watched videos in his own time to upskill.  He recommended a video tutorial site that has lessons from beginner to advanced and said that people who say they can't usually aren't interested and people who say they can do because they are extremely interested.  I watched him work Flash for two hours and then called it a day.   I showed Russ my prototype pitch bible and got feedback: he said that my illustration and photoshop skills are strong and that I'm very close to having a children's book with what I've got done already.  Nice to hear!  He was also very interested in seeing examples of my mascot work so you never know- I could get work through him someday.

Russ Taylor loves his work!

33.5 hours at Spoon this week.  I will go back to Spoon Monday and then off to TV3 to do work for Jamie L. at Jono and Ben.  They're in the pre-production phase of the show but he was very kindly told me he will find me something to do.  Hooray!  He will always be one of my favourite clients.  And if they run out of stuff, maybe the news department or somebody else will need a graphics intern.  It won't hurt to ask and show my portfolio around, too.  Fingers crossed, I hope to get 33 hours in with Jamie/TV3/Mediaworks next week which means I will need to find another provider for my third and final intern week up in Auckland.  I will also apply for hours with TaleEnders and Sit Pro back in Invercargill so all bases are covered and I am also giving back to local businesses.