Chris Bruno creates and edits videos

Internship Reflection

Fall 2023

By: Christopher Bruno

The second half of my internship at Ketcham Medicine Cabinets in Ronkonkoma was very enjoyable and went much more smoothly. Now that I had gotten used to the video-making process, I was able to pump them out much faster than before. I was still worried about not finishing all the videos we planned for, but I did end up doing all of them. That’s not because I rushed or crammed them, I just got lucky that three of them were for discontinued products and I could skip them.

At this point in the internship, I was trusted to keep pushing through the videos without stopping for approval.

Instead, I just watched through them all at the end with Brian Viccaro, my supervisor, and he just listed one or two minor tweaks to make for each of them, which barely took any time to do. Compared to the first few videos I had made, there were very few edits he had asked me to make by the end.

My midway essay was written just before I had started the 3D rendering project, something I had absolutely no experience with. The program I used was Foyr Neo, and I think I got used to it fairly quickly. There were 3D models of products already uploaded to the program, so I just had to place them. The original plan was to use this to render still images but instead I was told to make an interactive showroom. I made the showroom, textured the walls and floors, picked the lighting, and placed eight mirrors in the room. I placed camera points in front of each mirror, so the user is able to click on any of them to move up to the mirror and move the camera around.

The only notable problem we ran into was that the program had no easy way of adding text. Instead, there was a separate 3D model for each individual letter and number in the catalog, all of which were out of order. The plan was to write out the name of each product, but Brian had mercy and told me to just use them to display the model number.

The internship was split between working in-office on Mondays and from home on Fridays, and I found that I work much better in the office. Working from home was more inconvenient since we needed to use Google Drive to put the files I needed to make the videos. It’s much easier to have the entire image folder of a product on the computer already than to have to text Brian to upload what I needed to the drive so I could keep going. 

Working in the office was also better for the immediate feedback and questions I could ask. We tried a few times to use Microsoft Teams so I could share my screen but there was always some technical problem. What I ended up doing at home in the second half of the internship was just writing and generating the new AI narrations instead of working on the actual videos. It’s a tedious process to copy and type out the script from the old video and generate the new one, so it just made things easier to get that out of the way for next time I went to the office.

The last day of the internship was more of a small party. I spent the first hour doing those last few touch-ups I mentioned, and after that we just talked and had some food. Everyone brought in some food of their own, and I met the other intern for the first time since she came in on different days than I did.