The experience made me realise that I want to pursue a career in film

Kseniia is a first year Creative Media Production student who has undertaken an academic placement at Prague College. Here she explains how this has helped compliment her studies, expanded her experience, and has led to a unique summer opportunity with a leading english language news and video content provider.

Why were you interested in an academic placement with the Marketing team at Prague College?
I saw it as a great opportunity to apply the skills that I had learnt in the Creative Media Production program to real life projects and to get more practical experience. I also think the fact that I took on this role as a student will be a good thing on my resume once I graduate and hopefully, it will help me get a job in the future.

     

What are the tasks that you were required to?
I volunteered in video production, so my responsibilities include various tasks around video production such as filming events and interviews, editing and working closely with the marketing team on the various film projects.

What have you learnt?
I have learnt a lot of new skills. I’ve had the chance to film some interviews; some I did on my own and some I assisted with. I’ve found the experience extremely helpful. For example, for my final semester projects, I worked on two short documentaries, which meant that I had to film quite a lot of interviews. Due to my experience working on interviews with the Prague College marketing team, I felt much more confident filming my project interviews. I’ve also learnt a lot about editing. When quarantine started, my main task was to edit the projects that we filmed before lockdown, so I spent quite a bit of time working in Premiere Pro learning a lot of new features.

Did you feel part of the team? Were you managed and supervised, work independently or collaborate on the video projects?
For sure, I did feel a part of the team. From the very beginning I was involved in the whole process, from brainstorming the ideas with the marketing team to video production and delivering the final cut. Christophe was my supervisor and he is very supportive and helpful. I worked collaboratively on projects with Christophe and the marketing team which I found very useful because I learnt how to collaborate and work in a professional team.

How was your experience working on the In Their Own Words series?
The In Their Own Words series was quite a challenging project mostly because of the language. The series is about Prague College students talking about their experience of college life and living in Prague in their native language. So all the interviews were in different languages that I do not speak. It made both the filming and editing pretty difficult, especially with the subtitles. Another challenge was finding the right B-roll (supplementary footage). Since we were in quarantine, there was no way for us to film new B-roll, so Christophe and I had to search through all the archival footage from different resource libraries, which was not easy. However, I am really proud of the final results and it was definitely worth all the hard work that we put into this project.

Did you have a lot of creative input into the videos and how does it feel seeing your ideas come together?
Yes, I did! I had an opportunity to make my own creative decisions regarding both filming and editing, as well as coming up with ideas for the videos. It feels great to see the final versions of the videos that we worked on.

What are your plans for the future?
For now, I plan to finish my Bachelor’s degree at Prague College and then try to get into a cinematography program at FAMU.

Has your academic placement with Prague College helped you work out your future goals?
It has definitely helped me work out my future goals. It has helped me better realise that I want to specialise in camera work.

Post Note: Over the summer Xenia has been volunteering with Prague Morning, a leading english language news and video content provider. She has filmed and edited several promotional videos under the guidance of the Prague Morning editorial team who report that she does an excellent job and is great to work with!

Prague College offers a number of academic placements within the school. If you are interested to learn more, please get in touch with Student Services to discuss your future goals and areas that interest you professionally, to see if they can find an opportunity for you.