Looking Up – The SolidLine Winter Intern Blog: The Final Weeks

As mid-April rolled around, it was time to hit the road again.  Rather than East or West, we’d be heading South this time, first to that mecca of joy known as Disney World, and then to Birmingham, Alabama, a state I had never been to.  We rolled south looking forward to seeing “The Mouse”, and our job was to shoot interviews for a business conference at the Boardwalk Resort.  We set up the truck in the parking lot for the resort and established our shooting room in one of the conference rooms at the hotel.  That first night Greg made his famous ribs, which were pretty amazing.

We shot all day the next day, one interview after another, and wrapped at around 5 or 6.  That evening Dave and I went to check out Downtown Disney, as I hadn’t been to Disney World since I was a child.  It was cool to see it again, although we didn’t get to go into any of the parks, and it brought back some memories that I had forgotten.

On Wednesday we drove north, to Birmingham, Alabama, where we’d be shooting in a Veteran’s Hospital.  Here we didn’t have much space to shoot in, and we ended up shooting multiple interviews in the same hospital room using different set ups.  I was impressed that we were able to use the room so many times, with it looking different each time.  We wrapped our shoot in Birmingham the next day, and headed back to Chicago.  The next week Dave, Ed and I handled a shoot in Bloomington, IL, where we shot in a high school.  This shoot was hectic because there was so much to be shot, but we got everything we needed and the clients seemed very pleased with what we had done.

After the Bloomington shoot, I had one week left with SolidLine Media.  It had been an eye-opening four months, and I was going to miss being a part of the crew.  Our last week would be comprised of the same thing as my second week with the company, Husqvarna Equipment.  We returned to Resolution Digital Studios, to the same white soundstage, and set up much like we had in January.  This time, however, we had people from Husqvarna with us to answer any questions we had about the equipment we were shooting.  We spent Monday through Wednesday shooting a chainsaw, leaf blower, and trimmer, and it was nice to be back in the white soundstage.  I regained my job as the slate master as we barreled through a couple hundred various shots of the gear.

We didn’t have a shoot on Thursday, and then on Friday we had an early morning shoot in the loop.  We interviewed lawyer Richard Hanus for a promo video for his website.  After the shoot ended, the rest of the crew packed up to head to NIU for a quick shoot, but since I wouldn’t have had a way to get home, I didn’t go.  We enjoyed some chips in the parking garage, and they went on to shoot while I headed home for the day.  I decided to walk home, rather than take the train, and thought a lot about the last four months during that walk.

With SolidLine Media I got to see the country, I met CEO’s and ate some great meals.  I also learned about the nature of the corporate video world, and how “video production” is a broad term encompassing many different worlds.  I learned about operating within a company, and how key good communication is.  I also learned about myself.  My strengths, my weaknesses, and most importantly, my own goals.  I’ll spend the rest of this year doing everything I can think of to make my personal webseries a success and finally release it, as well as helping SolidLine in any way that I can.  I know that I’m now a much more experienced, and better, person for having worked with SolidLine all this time, and I can’t thank Greg, Michael, Ed, and Mike P. enough for all that I’ve learned from them.  I’ll be releasing more “SolidLine Truckers” videos throughout the summer beginning in a couple of weeks, so look forward to that.