Halfway Mark

:: So the quarter is half done, and I'm just getting to my second blog post. This fact in itself should be evidence to how very very busy I've been, as all of Electronic Media seems to be. I've been going home around 5PM every day, sometimes feeling accomplished, sometimes frustrated, but always tired.

In the past few weeks, I've done a ton of work. In week two I setup and worked my first live show ever at the Harvest Festival. I also learned a bit about Adobe Illustrator and used it to draw the setup diagrams we used for the equipment. I'm a lot more familiar with Photoshop, but I would definitely like to learn more about Illustrator. That week I also started the process to create a student group for this year's CD project. I finally attended the last workshop (along with Ben, Kris, and Andrew Desmarais) required to register as a student group last week. Now we need to start setting up meetings and make some decisions about topics like advertising for artists, publication formats, and budget concerns.

In week three I learned how to give proficiency tests for the 8-track studios. A good chunk of my time since has been helping the newer students get familiar with the studios in "signal tracing" sessions. Next week, most of them will be taking their tests, which will hopefully free up some of my own time.

Speaking of lack of time, a lot of my weekends got filled up as well. In fact, I didn't get a Saturday all to myself until week four. Week one was the initial EM waffle breakfast, week two was the Harvest Festival I mentioned earlier, and week three was taken up by my second live production in which I did sound for the grand reopening of the Longhouse Center. This event was filmed, so I was required to control audio going to the house for the audience to hear as well as control the audio feed for the film crew's use. All in all, for all the complexities that that event presented, the whole team did a great job. Plus, our longer-than-expected 10-hour day was rewarded by pizza.

By week four, I was starting to feel a little burned out, and I guess it showed because Zena told me I needed to take a day off. So after a pretty normal three days, I took Thursday to rest up. Right after that, it was back into the frying pan. I got to go through training for the movable walls in the Longhouse, which basically meant that I got to volunteer for the wall moves that nobody else wanted to do. So this last Tuesday and Wednesday, I got to wake up two hours early to go push walls around. I wasn't happy about getting up early, but I decided to offset that by going home a little early on Wednesday.

My brain has been jam-packed with stuffing in the past month or so, and it's awesome. I've learned about live sound; I've learned about computer programs like iCal, FileMaker, and Illustrator; I've updated the work order system of reserving audio studio by writing documents for processing procedures, posting the studio calendar online for students to check from home, and even reformatted the work order form to be a little more logical; I've coordinated the creation of a student group that will eventually oversee the release of a full-length student album, as well as drawn up poster design for advertising; I've started learning with the other interns about the details of computer hardware and Mac OSX Leopard.

And after all that, I still have a whole page of topics that I want to learn about and projects I want to work on. I'd like to work on getting Foley props and a sound effects library into the new audio labs. Also, I'd like to check out the Wyse software used for game audio. A while ago, I was contacted about a director needing a sound crew for a zombie movie; I haven't heard back from him, but I think that'd be majorly fun to work on. Around the same time that came up, I was contacted by two students wanting to record a soundtrack for their own movie. Again, I haven't heard back, but I really want to find someone to take into the studio. Anyway, maybe I'll get to them all, maybe I won't. Either way, it's radtacular ::