Field Notes: The Media School Travel Blog

When I arrived in L.A. in January, I didn’t have an internship lined up. I was in the early stages of communicating with an esports company about interning with its content production team. After a couple of meetings with the team in their offices in Santa Monica, I was offered the internship and started a few weeks later.

I played a lot of video games in high school but stopped when I got to college, so getting back into the world of video games was an interesting challenge. I was grateful that the company was willing to offer me an internship despite lacking the knowledge of the industry that the rest of the employees had.

The content production team’s primary objectives are to broadcast company events and to create original content for YouTube and other platforms. They brought me on mainly to be a video editor for original content.

By the second week at the company, I was editing the rough assembly cut of a “Minecraft” show for Snapchat. I took the clips that were selected, brought them into Adobe Premiere Pro, pieced them together and added the proper credit text for the person who provided the clip. The episode went on to the lead editor, who made tweaks to the clip order and edited. After he was done and the team had all done a pass, it went on to Snapchat, where each episode would get more than a million views.

In addition to editing the “Minecraft” show, I also helped out on two broadcasts for the company. Both of these broadcasts were done for the game publisher, so we were working with very specific guidelines. The first one was for World Golf Tour, where I was tasked with operating the in-broadcast leaderboard and the player graphics. The second broadcast was for PUBG Mobile, where I was at a PC acting as a third-person spectator. I communicated with the technical director to make sure I was getting the right shots and that my screen was ready to be shown on the broadcast.

My time at the company taught me a lot. Unfortunately, the program was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before I had to leave, they were planning on having me more involved in setting up the production studio. Luckily, I am still able to work on the “Minecraft” show remotely from Indiana. Even though my time in Los Angeles was cut short, my internship allowed me to see and do a lot of things in the new media realm that will be really useful in a job search.

I viewed the Semester in Los Angeles Program as a “test run” of living in the L.A., and it exceeded expectations in every way. When I graduate in May, I’m going to enter a world that is full of uncertainty, even more so than normal. However, one thing is for certain: Southern California is where I want to be.