Aaron Clark: Personal Webspace

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Spriggs: Episode 1

Working at the Library of Congress has been satisfying work in terms of finances, but when it comes to creativity, it's left me a bit unhappy. So in early October when my friend Mike comes to me and says he wants to make a Machinima using Halo 3, I had to jump at the opportunity. It took us close to five weeks to complete our first episode of "Spriggs", and that included a number of technical hurdles, as well as some casting and crew development. I've been doing a broad spectrum of duties that evolved from "Director of Cinematography" to "Art Director" to "Assistant Director". In the end I did a little bit of everything short of writing. I puppeted characters, I composed shots, I edited, I've done some voice work and voice direction, and I've been working on the site. It's been keeping me busy, and I like how the project has been developing. And more importantly, it's been a lot of fun. It won't make an outstanding portfolio piece, but I feel like it's been offering me a number of creative opportunities. And at this point in my life, I really need that, so I've been glad to have the opportunity to help create something like this.

Labels: Machinima

posted by Aaron Clark at 2:57 PM | 0 Comments

Saturday, October 27, 2007

"Slow Dance" video online.

I had almost given up on this video, which I had worked on back on the first of July. Every so often I would search online to see if it had come out, if it was getting listened to, stuff like that. Today I absentmindedly decided to give it another shot, and managed to find it on MySpace. The quality of the video encode sucks, and I generally feel underwhelmed by the video itself, but it still feels a bit gratifying to see something you worked on out there and being able to say "I worked on that". If you don't remember my post from my experience as a PA on the first shoot, I mainly did stuff pertaining to the tulip crane in the Porsche scene in Fell's Point. I helped unpack, assemble, and operate the bad boy, and somewhere in between all of that, I managed to find five consecutive hours to sit on the street corner and guard the unassembled crane pieces. Oh, and I was also on the boat providing the director shade so he could see the LCD screen on his Panasonic P2. Who's to say if working on this video will contribute to my success in the future, but you have to start somewhere.

Labels: Film Production

posted by Aaron Clark at 9:09 PM | 0 Comments

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Pushin Carts at the Library of Congress

A few weeks back, I put my resume and information on CareerBuilder to aid in my job search. Initially, it didn't really help all that much, and jobs I wanted seemed like a dubious prospect. Although, interestingly, a job actually came to me. A placement agency called PeopleCom contacted me because the Library of Congress was in need of people for A/V work. I wasn't really all that interested at first, as I really didn't like the idea of a commute to DC, and I wanted to remain within art. However, in the "real world", one doesn't always get to do what one wants. And with a low bank balance looming overhead, I decided to take the job, for no other reason than to keep from going completely broke.

The commute is probably the most agravating aspect of the job. The job itself isn't so bad, but damn, the commute! Starting out, I've been coming in at 7am, which is absolutely horrid when you realize that I have to get up around 4am to have enough time to get up, have breakfast, drive to the edge of the neighborhood, park, walk over to Penn Station, take the 5:35am MARC Train to Union Station, and walk from Union to the Madison building where I arrive just shy of 7am.

It sucks.

I figure the commute takes up to 4 hours out of my day. Today especially sucked coming home. The 45 minute ride took closer to an hour and a half. Weather perhaps? All I know is that I nearly freaked out. I didn't recognize where we were, and I thought I had slept through the Penn Station stop. Nope. Just traveling very slowly.

Like I said, the job isn't so bad. It's not that much different from what I did when I worked at A/V Services at UMBC. Different place, different people, more responsibilities, and twice the pay. It's not a whole lot different, and my only complaint is that I don't have downtime like I did at UMBC A/V. When I'm not pushing carts, I'm on the part of the job that they didn't tell me about, Helpline. No one told me that when not busy I would be playing operator. I'm a little miffed, because it means I have to learn two sets of responsibilities and I'm probably being paid the same as the ones that only have one set to learn. Although, in the end, I think I got the better deal, I get out from behind the desk. They don't. And the one thing I learned very well from working at the Country Club, is that time flies when you're busy, especially when you're busy on your feet.

So in a nutshell, my job is to push carts and to answer the ITS Helpline.

That's about all I really have the energy I have to say right now. I have to be up tomorrow sometime between 4 and 4:30am, and ridiculous as it may sound, it's already past my bedtime.

Labels: a/v

posted by Aaron Clark at 8:53 PM | 3 Comments

Monday, July 2, 2007

Kal "Slow Dance"

I had my first experience working as a production assistant yesterday on a music video for a new R&B artist known as Kal. It was an interesting experience to say the least, and helped reaffirm my distaste for production.

There were shoots in three locations, a docked boat, an indoor party scene, and a street corner. The boat scene was dealt with fairly quickly, and was shot with a Panasonic P2 camera on the nose of the boat. My job was to block the sun so the director could see the LCD screen on his camera. Not glorious work, but important when you consider that without being able to see what you're doing, you can't do anything.

The second shoot was the indoor party scene, which I wasn't even there for. I was pulled off with the crane crew to unpack the pieces of what is essentially an elaborate and potentially dangerous seesaw. Now, this wasn't so bad in and of itself, but then I was instructed to stay with the crane by myself for five hours while they did the second shoot. So from 4pm to 9pm, I was sitting on a street corner in Baltimore by myself, staring at a crane that was in twelve pieces. You wouldn't think doing nothing would be so excruciating until you're left with such a mundane task for such a long period of time. The only thing that kept it from being completely unbearable was when one of the other PAs was sent to bring me food and keep me company for a bit. Turns out he was a bit of an old school anime geek, and we chatted up about a bunch of stuff for much longer than he was supposed to.

Around 9pm, the crane crew came back and we put the tulip crane together, a job which took 5 people to do safely and effectively. After which my patience paid off as I got to help operate the crane. The way the crane works is that the camera operator gets strapped in on one end, and then the opposite side is counterbalanced so that with some effort, you can smoothly move the camera operator up and down and all around by hand. This last part of the shoot was actually kind of fun and I felt like I learned a little, but it was still a pretty long and stressful day.

I ended up working 13 hours for only $50, as opposed to $75 as I had previously been told. Thankfully I didn't have to take the bus home, as the director and his crew were able to drop me off on the way to their hotel. Which in all likelihood was an even trade as I helped them find their way out of the city.

If anything, this experience has taught me that I really ought to get into pre-production or post-production, and failing that, always have sunscreen and work gloves handy.