My name is Emily Brennan and I am a senior Film & Video
major and illustration concentrator. During this 2018 spring semester, I was a
Visual Productions intern for the National Aquarium in Baltimore, MD. I found
this internship after a guest speaker in one of my film classes mentioned one
of her early opportunities with video was at the aquarium. I am extremely
interested in animals and after spending some time on their website I found
this opportunity. I had originally applied for the summer 2017 period and was
contacted for an interview but had to turn it down for another opportunity. I
reapplied for the spring period and had a phone interview a few weeks later,
after which I was accepted as the Visual Productions intern.
There was a lot of flexibility in what I was able to do with
my time here, as it is a small department at a nonprofit company. When I first
began in January, I expected almost exclusively be editing, because I knew that
was the part of video I was the most interested in, the best at, and the most
likely to get a career doing. However, I went on a few shoots with the videographer
and I discovered I do enjoy filming in non-narrative settings. Everyone on the
team was incredibly encouraging so I wasn’t nervous about making mistakes,
which is usually a major obstacle for me.
A majority of my time was definitely spent editing. I
created three short educational videos meant for social media. I would write a
script, go through the raw footage, produce a cut, and design the motion
graphics for each video. Cutting footage is what I’m most experienced with and
I loved being able to work with video of animals. The motion graphics work was
entirely new to me. I was somewhat familiar with the After Effects interface
from previous work, but I had never used it to work with text. In the first
social video I was able to use a template from previous videos, and adjust the
keyframes as needed; by the second one I designed and pitched some new looks in
a meeting.
I also had the opportunity to shadow the Rainforest and
Australia departments for research. This didn’t end up being directly related
to the career path I want to go down, but they were really cool experiences
that I wouldn’t have been able to have otherwise, and I got to do things like
hand feed a bat and assist in the bird recall.
Through this internship I was learned a plethora of skills
outside of video editing that many editors should still know, such as motion
graphics, archiving, and videography. This was also a very good internship to
have during a school semester as it wasn’t as demanding as the one I had at
Turner over the summer.
