Internship report part 1

Last spring, I did an internship at an animation studio in Brussels, Belgium. It is an association so they basically hire everyone. I sent a letter with my CV and the address of my blog, as I did earlier in the year, and they hired me.
The studio is located in Brussels, near the train station downtown. It’s situated in an old building, which they are renovating, it by the way. The association is very small with fewer than 10 employees, including the tutor and some part-time assistants. But it looks bigger because of all the trainees and the animators, who are financed by the studio and work with them but they don’t have the same status as employees. We can distinguish two main activities in the assocation: first, there’s the production of arty movies. If the employees at the studio find their project interesting, they can produce their movies. Secondly, we’ve got « l’atelier collectif » managed by the tutors and comprised of trainees who are making movies. The company philosophy is about providing originality and diversity in animation by trying to do something new in every project.
We were in charge of writing scripts for one project. We had to do some research on inventions given up for dark reasons and write a script for a voice-over. We shot some stop-motion tests for this project. Then, our job consisted of making characters and background designs for another project dealing with the Auschwitz camps. Finally, we helped the team make puppets for the No Go Zone project, a movie telling the story of a man who stayed in Fukushima after the reactor’s explosion.
The qualities necessary for the job were mainly self-motivation because they don’t really push us to do things and don’t have real deadlines. We also needed perseverence and autonomy for the same reason. And of course creativity, because we were part of the creative team. We worked with other trainees and our tutors, but we could also see the directors, financed by the studio, at lunch time to talk to them. My work placement lasted 6 weeks, from May 18th to July 3rd. We started at 9h30 and finished at 4h30pm. We didn’t work on weekends.

Nice job! Very good English, and an interesting experience too!