Working Hard or Hardly Working

Welcome to my nine to five blog update! So first off, it’s more like a ten-ish to four-ish routine…depending on the day…except the one night shoot which lasted from nine at night until two am.  Then there’s some days we might not come in until eleven.  Interning at a production and creative agency is not exactly your conventional desk job.  My first impression from bigO came from their website.  Go ahead and read this “about” blurb and try to tell me this isn’t the coolest company.  I might be a little biased, but working at bigO has been incredible.  The 15 person team is full of unique and diverse people from all over the world with so many different skills.  It was an amazing opportunity to get to work with all of them.

Don’t get me wrong; there were plenty of days that I spent simply sitting at my desk.  I did things like spot check images for the Cruinniú na nóg website, research events to publicize on Creative Ireland’s social media, source and note times codes of video footage bought from RTE, and create image sets of projects to display on bigO’s website.  And when no one in the office had a job for me…you could find me writing this blog or playing around with creative software and making travel videos just for fun.

I mentioned a night shoot that literally took ALL night.  It was a really cool and different work experience.  The event was a shoot for b-roll for a video promoting Fringe Fest, an Irish festival celebrating traditionally low-culture and brash, or out of the ordinary types of artistic performances.  In the past, these acts would be ‘on the fringe’ of a true arts festival, and now Fringe Festival is one of the largest talent celebrations in Ireland.  During the day, I went on a shopping trip through the city to joke shops and thrift shops to look for props.  I ended up with a rabbit mask, red lens filters, a Venitian medicine mask, and red smoke bombs.  The theme of this video is basically no theme…or things not actually being as they originally appear.  Only about half of the footage and props ended up in the video, but that’s to be expected.  We trekked all across Dublin to iconic bridges, streets, and monuments to get images of them in the dark that made for an eerily cool video.  After four hours of holding cameras and lights, please enjoy the link to the 47 second video we have to show for it.  That might have sounded sarcastic, and yes, four hours for 47 seconds isn’t a fair trade, but it’s actually one of the most fun parts about this job and industry: the opportunities and creativity.  After we finished work for the Fringe account, I was asked to create mock ups and image sets for the Fringe Festival project description on bigO’s website to showcase the company’s work.  All in all, Fringe Festival was an incredibly fun project to be a part of.

Another project I had the opportunity to work on was a government video celebrating the 25th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality and Pride month in Dublin.  Ireland has an interesting history when it comes to the LGBTQ community.  Homosexuality was not decriminalized until 1993 and then twenty years later in 2013, the population voted and passed a referendum legalizing same-sex marriage.  Ireland is known for being a historically Catholic nation and in the past, the Church had major influence in the government.  Ireland gained independence and established its own government in about 1920 and did not begin to modernize until about 1970.  Under the guidance of famous senator and social activist David Norris, the Irish people began to ask for the repeal of the criminalization law in the 1970s.  In the past 25 years, legislation saw a fairly quick turnaround on this issue, which the government wanted to celebrate.  The piece chronicles the Irish people and government’s work and accomplishments in the past 25 years.  For this video, I was able to meet the current and openly gay Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and famous Irish Drag Queen, Rory O’Neill / Panti Bliss.  The video was put on social media platforms by the Irish government to celebrate 25 years of decriminalization on June 25, 2018.

I spent a lot of time on creating project overviews and displays for bigO’s website for multiple clients.  After months of working on Fringe Festival shoots and design, three years of branding for Slane Whiskey, and days worth of footage for Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance, bigO has a lot to be proud of.  It seemed finally time to display all that dedication and creativity on bigO’s site.  To help with this project, over a few weeks I went out to locations across Dublin with the company’s photographer to take creative pictures of the Fringe Festival brochure.  bigO designed and did the photography for the brochure, so these pictures were a way to creatively display the work.  Out on these shoots, I tended to have photo assistant jobs like holding the sun screen or flash bulb.  I would also take pictures on my phone of the photo shoot (inception, I know) so that bigO could post updates on their social media of what we were out doing.  In the end, it was my job to combine pictures from a previous photo shoot involving Fringe Festival artists with photos of the brochure to create an aesthetic visual that encompassed the creative photography and design that bigO achieved with this project.   I created the same kind of banners and body photo trios for the Slane Whiskey project overview.  With this project I was provided all of the photos and videos since the client’s brand has been three years in the making.  I actually really wanted to visit Slane, since it is the name of the street in Clemmons, NC that I have lived on for 18 years.  I even chose to write my independent research paper for class about Slane Village.  While I never made it out to Slane, I was glad to be a part of the bigO write up for the brand.  I did the same kind of work pulling screengrabs and stills from videos for Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance.  All of these projects gave me a glimpse into the really cool work that bigO does.

After two months at my first real office internship, I feel like I lived through a great season of the office.  Between everyone getting irritated by Hillary from RTE, playing with the office dogs, and commiserating about the one toilet that drips, I felt like I really worked there.  Some days I spent hours at my desk frustrated by Photoshop, while others I was running all over the city buying things and snapping pictures, and that’s what I loved about this job.  A big thank you to bigO for such an amazing experience.