Intern post number two

I have a (small) confession to make.

I don't know French.

I never learned French when I was younger, and now I'm wishing I had. It would make things a bit easier for me. I never really saw it as something I needed to know (though I wanted to learn after I took a trip to Montreal last summer) but something that I kept procrastinating (gasp!) on learning. Most of the time if someone speaks slowly to me in French I get an idea of what they're saying, but it's not perfect. Where does this fit in with 21inc? Everything is bilingual. Which I think is awesome. Except I keep making changes to the website and then am reminded that I have to go in and change the French version too. If it's text? Have to wait for someone to translate it.

So something I would like to gain out of working at 21inc is to at least have a grasp on French. My title does have the word 'communications' in it, and probably that should stretch to both languages. (This will be put on the backburner until after school is finished. My other summer goals are to paint more, get into traditional illustration, make comics and go to the beach.)

One thing that I'm already gaining in my (so far) short time here is experience working in an office environment. I've had a few jobs before this (I actually go to school full time and have another job) so I know what it's like to work somewhere, but usually there's a lot of managers telling you "you have to do this and that and so on and so forth..." but here.. I have a number of things that Tim and I decided I'd be working on, and I get to self-direct myself. I have a really short attention span, so it's nice because I have a number of very different things I can work on (layouts, video editing, web stuff) so once I need a break from one thing I can move on to something else. I find that that's how I work best when I'm doing homework, so it's nice to see that I can apply that to a workplace as well (though obviously things that have a deadline get priority.)

What I've been working on today is a webisode for our e-newsletter, with interview footage that I took at the event at Up a few weeks ago. It's actually really convenient because in my A/V production class we just recently went over documentary editing (which was basically putting interviews together) so it seems less daunting now. Putting all the footage together is almost like a puzzle though, but not in a bad way.