Week No. 2

The second week of my internship here started off as many "seconds" are wont to do - with less fanfare and a little more focus. Since we were still operating under the paradigm of "planning for a project that has yet to officially start," much of our day-to-day is still tied to conceptual work.

This is, all in all, not a bad thing. We've gotten to play around in the "design" sandbox, which is an arena which might otherwise go ignored in the role of "training to be an effective producer." I enjoy design; design is what got me interested in production in the first place, and it will always hold its own appeal to me.

With that in mind, it is slightly disconcerting to work on so many different pieces of the design puzzle, given the current nature of the project as more "big-picture" than "small-picture." Here are a couple of the disparate design pieces worked on:

As mentioned in the last entry, we spent some time this week working on story segments for the mission "campaign" that is at the center of the NFA experience. Knowing that, in general, all of us working on the story segment are at least somewhat creative, it was interesting to see how each of our respective educational backgrounds influenced our delivery of the story. Since we were all working on top-down slices of the story, rather than just segments, I think that we were really able to provide some useful comparative takes on scripting this thing out.

I also spent a lot of time trying to work through putting together a prototype of the first mission. It's always tough getting over the hump of learning a new set of tools, and in this case - working with the flight-simulator engine we're using - the process felt particularly arcane. Somewhere down the line, I know we're looking at some third-party tools to help craft these missions, and I only hope that I can generate something worthwhile - something edifying and useful - with the prototype I'm working on with the out-of-the-box tools before we (as production interns) move into the more organizational aspects of the project.

Here's to hoping that next week, we get to move into the "official" opening of the project, and we can focus in and create some specific goals and deliverables. I suppose we'll see!