One of the first things I was doing was animating titles for the MICA orientation video they debuted for this year’s freshman class. It was somewhat surreal having just ended a MICA semester to then having MICA as a client. After a few days myself and another animation intern were given a project just for the two of us: a small 30 second commercial for a local dog walking company. Most of my internship was spent on this project as me and the other intern scripted the animation, put it through pre-production, generated assets, animated, and took care of all the post production work as well. The time I wasn’t spent working on that animation I was doing odds and ends: animating stylized titles for this-and-that, doing post-production work, custom scene transitions, and general intern duties. I spent a lot of time working with other interns from other departments as their summer time mission was to go out and do small pro-bono shorts about local Baltimore business. That’s where a lot of odds and ends animation came into play, whatever they needed, I got to them. Aside from doing I also, ya know, learned. Another animator there was able to teach me a fair amount of a program called cinema 4d, one of the few programs I had never really touched before. They also taught me some new tips and tricks to streamlining the animations process from idea to final as well as how to streamline my productivity within Adobe products and how to deliver a quality product. This helped create a snappy and efficient pipeline that is still tediously helping my personal workflow as I head into my senior year.
Overall, 15four is a great place filled with a lot of young professional people who, even though I’m still a student, still treated me as an intellectual and creative peer with just as many good things to bring to the table as any other employee. They did a good job of making my time seem worthwhile and helping me improve myself as an artist.
-Mike Petrick '14 Animation
