My Time as a Video Production Intern
For the past semester, I have been working as an intern at Bastione Group, a media broadcasting company based in Atlanta, GA. The company focuses primarily on distribution of content for television that makes its way to viewers’ television through technologies like cable and satellite. Bastione Group broadcasts a wide variety of film and television media by distributing its content through different channels that organize content based on genre. For instance, there are channels specifically aimed towards family films, comedy films, crime films, action films, and other genres.
Throughout my internship, I worked as a video editor, whose task was to create promotional content for movies—trailers. These trailers would either be for a specific film, or for an entire channel that hosted multiple films of the same genre. However, this came with a few questionable challenges—most notably a thirty-second maximum for each promo. Usually, movie trailers are anywhere from one to a few minutes long, however, I consistently had to make my work less approximately thirty-seconds. Providing a genuine explanation of the film’s plot while also getting users engaged with the film enough to take the action to watch the rest of it is a daunting task, but the challenge is what made it rewarding.
Because watching an entire movie takes a lot of time, I was forced to make the promotional content with minimal exposure to the film. This is a rather risky approach. After all, I quite literally had to judge a movie by its cover—as well as by any additional context I was able to find within a moment’s notice. This was the primary challenge in the internship and is what made the process of making movie promos enjoyable. This would be similar to if a literature teacher asked a student to write an essay on a book they have never read. It is possible—many students write essays on books they were supposed to read but, against their teacher’s advice, didn’t—but most of the time the work falls beneath expectations and the student receives a poor grade. Naturally, I was initially unsatisfied with my work for this reason. However, as I worked through different movies, I eventually built the skill to make promos I was proud of.
I learned a lot through my internship at Bastione Group—the most important lessons being the value of improvisation, collaboration, and consistently saving your work files instead of assuming they are constantly backed up to the cloud. For those interested, feel free to check out the playlist attached below of some of the promotional content I made during my internship.
