wyclef at rolling stone

If you've been following my blog, you might remember that I mentioned meeting Wyclef Jean on the first day of my internship. That wouldn't be the last time I'd see him as he came in again for an acoustic session in November.

Watch his performance here as he busts into a freestyle out of a classic:

happy holidays!

If you know me at all, you know my favorite part of the Christmas season are the lights and decorations. So the other night, I rented the 7D and took some photos of the wonderful displays around New York (well mainly around Rockefeller Center since that's where the huge tree is). Enjoy!

Look closely and you'll see there's a proposal happening. While I was
taking the photo I didn't even notice until I heard everyone cheering
because I was trying to focus the lens on the tree.

online portfolio

For my final project in Interactive, I designed and built an online portfolio of my work using DreamWeaver. Thanks to my generous cousin, Martin, the site is actually live as he is hosting it for me temporarily. I will eventually have to setup my own space and domain to be more professional, but just don't quite have the funds to do so yet. What is currently up is what I submitted for my final, but I definitely want to continue to develop and tweak it. I'll be taking an intermediate Interactive course next semester so looking forward to that.

Side note: The form on the contact page doesn't actually work, since I'm waiting for my professor to set it up for me as he said he would.

So without further ado, voila!  This semester's labor of love.

semester wrap-up!

I just finished my third semester of grad school! Only one more to go...

The past 3 weeks have been quite stressful and busy but now I can relax and recap the last few weeks.

• I was given the opportunity to teach a set of two, two-part Intro to Final Cut Pro Workshops to Parsons MFA Fine Arts & Photography students. Yet another opportunity to lend and exercise my talents to the department I work for. The first class I taught was definitely nerve-wracking as it was my first time ever teaching a class...and to students who admit are not the most tech-savvy people no less. So that was definitely another challenge in itself. But the first section went well and I was able to adjust my lesson plan and better my way of explaining things with the second group.

• I completed my internship with the online media team at Rolling Stone. Funny thing is that on my last day I was able to go on-location for the first time since the summer and it was a fun shoot. So the internship was book-ended with  a good first day, meeting Wyclef, and ended with a delicious pork loin cooked by Deane Sheremet. Although, I completed my time with one team, I will be returning to Rolling Stone at the end of January for an internship with the web design team. And if you haven't checked rollingstone.com recently, go now. They unveiled their redesigned site and I helped with a lot of the backend migration of their media. I'll post more videos I helped with as they become available on the site.

•  I will post my final project from my Interactive class separately.

• Last week one of my professors was able to get our class free admission to a live streaming TEDWomen conference  at the Paley Center. Although when she spoke about it, we were all under the impression we would be attending the actual conference, but it was still pretty interesting and a nice little perk to being a Media Studies student.

• Book recommendations (both were used for a comparative analysis between Pixar & DreamWorks Animation): 
• The Pixar Touch, David Price (read parts of the book for research last semester and read more this semester. Very inspirational, and only made my love for Pixar even greater)
• The Men Who Would Be King, Natalie LaPorte (an inside take on the drama behind the story of DreamWorks, kinda felt like a gossip mag)

This is probably the most text-heavy post I've ever written for this blog so I'll leave it at that :)

Happy Holidays!