Intern’s Corner with Taylor: Shadowing Mark Borja
Welcome to my corner! I’m Taylor Helson, the Digital Content Intern at Beasley Media Group in Charlotte for the summer.
It’s 2018, we all do a lot of scrolling, liking, reposting, tagging and sending emojis literally anywhere they’ll fit. I, however, think I have you beat with this internship. As the ~intern,~ I usually write posts for each station’s websites, which I then shamelessly plug on the respective Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. Outside of the usual writing, publishing and scheduling posts, I have gotten many opportunities to meet, shadow and learn from awesome, charismatic radio personalities.
Today, however, I got to shadow the videographer for all things Beasley Media Group, here in Charlotte, Mark Borja.
My day with Mark started off with brainstorming and bagels. Nothing gets your morning going like that combination, right? The objective for today was to create a creative, fun video for each station’s Instagram and Twitter.
With each station, we stayed with the theme of questions in all of their forms and tempos. For some stations, we recorded radio talent responding to fast-paced This-or-That questions relating to said station’s interests, others took the accent challenge, which lead to heated arguments on the correct way to say simple words, or even questions challenging how well two spouses know each other.
Mark scheduled out times to meet and film with each station’s talent and we headed back to the production room to get the cameras rolling.
In the production room, the cameras and microphones were pretty much all set up, all we had to do was turn it all on. This definitely made for a quick and easy video shoot, so the on-air talents could get back into their respective studios.
When everything was filmed, we returned back to the office (yes, I said office … I have broken away from the cubicle!) to edit. I watched as Mark chopped and compiled all of the clips in Adobe Premiere. To me, Premiere is like a second language that I have limited proficiency with, but I think Mark might be fluent. While I couldn’t keep up with his clicks, I was able to pick up on the importance of video content and precision in filming and editing.
While some might assume that radio business is strictly audio, video is just as important. It is much more appealing to an audience to have faces to match with voices they constantly hear. These videos allow for radio personalities to shine behind a camera rather than a mic and give their fans and followers a little something more to hold onto.
With a little help from a jazzy playlist, Mark worked on making full videos for YouTube channels, quick clips for Instagram and Twitter, and then resized videos for IGTV. When he finished exporting everything, he sent it my way and I sent it out on the socials. I guess you could say I had the easier job today, considering it took me no more than 3 minutes to send out everything that he had spent all day working on.
Taylor Helson – High Point University
Digital Content Intern – Charlotte, NC
