Internship at Submarine Channel: Interning in the production industry
From interactive documentaries to VR shorts and motion comics, Submarine Channel is an Amsterdam based production companies that has been defying genres of filmmaking and animation for quite a while already. As wide a range as getting an Emmy, to have a blog, I was able to witness the actual behind the scenes of vanguard entertainment and arts production.
A door into the professional world
Getting this internship was the real tricky part. I had to basically harass by soon to be supervisor into accepting me there. But this is what gets you into this industry. The people there are stubborn but motivated to achieve their artistic vision. I had to wait months and deny many other internship opportunities (I never thought I would be in a position to deny a job) until I got the position right before the deadline for getting and internship was there. It was truly worth it as I got a great introduction into working in production, my cinephile dream. I got to be surrounded by some of the most creative people for 5 months and work in the most laid back office one can hope for as a first internship. Getting to know about projects that have not been released yet, witnessing project brainstorms and being surrounded by producer mentors truly is all I could have asked for. But things do not always got according to plan.
Unsure times
This is when the wave of virus hit. The uncertainty that was in the atmosphere at the office. People starting to be a bit distant, people calling in sick. This was all the start of the period of my internship I will call pre-production. It felt as if I was never going out of this stage and all of the efforts to get the internship, preparations and work previously done would end up being wasted. But hopefully we adapted. I got a bit more free time since we had a small team and it was hard for them to transition to online work but the biggest hit was that so many projects got halted and even canceled. There was suddenly a lot less work to look forward to.
Internship research
Throughout my internship I was able to work on a research in collaboration with the company hosting me. I ended up doing something that would improve their work. This was a study on the different types of posts a creative entity posts on social media. We basically were trying to see what is the best type of post that a creator and maker audience would mostly react to and engage with in order to gain a bigger voice on platforms such as Instagram. It turns out that the type of posts will have a significant impact on the reach of a brand on social media but my results were not very representative of that.
My experience
In summary, I would highly recommend an internship Submarine Channel for anyone interested in production. The diversity of tasks makes it possible to take interest in any of the departments and it the team small enough for you to navigate smoothly through all of them. I had to do a lot of minor marketing and editorial tasks but really felt a part of the bigger picture of the company. This is a great place to be doing the university internship because the supervisor is also very helpful and understanding for the research report needed to be worked on the side. This internship clearly showed me that this is definitely the field I would like to work in for the future and I recommend the same to any other entertainment enthusiast.
Enzo Soubra