internship review.

general impressions.

My internship experience with The Swoop has been a career positive. As the site coordinator, I was afforded valuable leadership opportunities which allowed me to be the head of a fantastic production team. My site offer outlined various objectives to be met through this internship, and I’m pleased to say The Swoop has facilitated all of my professional objectives and more. Every day I was engaged in a professional production environment with multiple projects under production at once. Much of our work is team generated through various collaborations. Our four-person crew would spend hours sculpting scripts and ironing out details, critiquing each others’ ideas and building off of them. Each of us has an area of focus: Levi is the photographer, Lucy is our audio engineer, Tony is our media marketing consultant, and I’m the videographer and video editor. We are able to bring different perspectives from each of our niche areas to fine tune multi-media projects and create cohesive campaigns.

making contacts.

The Swoop has afforded me the opportunity to establish strong connections and contacts with our clients and other industry professionals. The clients we worked with on the Coalport Promo-Doc have connected me with other mining museums in Johnstown, recommending me to spearhead similar projects for their own stories. While working on various research projects and laying the groundwork for a research-themed podcast, I connected with several working industry professionals. After the conclusion of my internship, I’ve been asked to stay on as a volunteer to continue working with these Ph.D’s on their ongoing research.

refining communication skills.

I have spent most of my higher education developing my skills as a filmmaker and cinematographer, so I had many goals in mind for this summer to help achieve those goals. The Swoop has allowed me to grow my skills as a videographer and video editor on multiple projects. I was able to try new editing styles through the lens of documentary. Coalport was a multi-faceted production consisting of talking-head shots, b-roll, animated images, and archival footage. It was a great experience tying everything together to create a single narrative. It was rewarding to be able to take the assets we had available to us through the museum, and build our own interpretations of Coalport’s history off of that. Working in this way helped me develop my scriptwriting and story-telling abilities in ways that were unexpected. We were able to take a real-life survival story and incorporate it into the video in a way that was narratively interesting while preserving the historical integrity of the experience.

summary.

Concluding this internship, I have become a more well-rounded communications professional. I have developed and refined my skills with handling clients, schedules, and paperwork. I am thankful for the numerous producer and managerial frames I’ve been able to operate in. As the productions coordinator, I strengthened my confidence to command a room and to be a true team leader. I feel that I’m now able to undertake more responsibility and handle complicated productions. These new leadership opportunities have widened my avenues as a cinematographer as well. I’m much more comfortable with offering my creative input and stepping into directorial positions when guiding other members of the crew.