Internship Experience: Sarah Benedict

Sarah Benedict

Leicester Productions is a non-profit based in Salt Lake City that provides local filmmakers with a platform to share untold stories about their community. I was a social media intern this semester, which involved designing Instagram posts, animating graphics for their YouTube, and illustrating stickers. This experience has proven to be irreplaceable, allowing me to implement my creative skills within a professional setting. As both a film and art student, this internship has meaningfully combined several of my interests and helped me forge connections with like-minded professionals in my field.

From the beginning of the internship, it was evident that I would need to integrate elements of their previous posts to maintain their brand, but also find a way to make their feed more personalized and unique. Since they had previously used premade Canva templates for their posts, it felt important to me to create posts that were more authentic and catered specifically towards their company. As I began to develop my own designs, I integrated elements that my supervisors were typically drawn to, like consistent use of texture/noise, film-related motifs, and cool colors. I felt that my work was able to maintain my personal preferences and introduce more creative designs to their feed, while not noticeably deviating from their Instagram’s pre-established style.

One of my goals with this internship was to identify gaps in Leicester Production’s current social media system and devise potential solutions. While looking at their logo assets, I discovered that the main fox graphic they were using was only saved in a .png format. This could be an issue later if they ever needed to scale up their graphic for merchandise or for printing in larger formats. I decided to utilize Adobe Illustrator to trace their logo into a vector format. I also animated the fox in order to heighten their professional image and add more life to the design when used in their videos. In this instance, I took the initiative to demonstrate how animation can be implemented into their social media platforms to increase engagement.

For their Sticker Drive fundraising event, I had the opportunity to illustrate cutesy, cartoon drawings of their fox mascot that were more reflective of my personal artistic style. My supervisors had encountered my art because of Local Artist Sticker Machine, a program which promotes Utah artists, and recognized my passion for creating this sort of content. This simultaneously provided an answer to what they could give donors during their drive, and validated my desire to make art that is more personally fulfilling. I produced a variety of sketches with the fox in different film-related scenarios and cultivated proposals so that we could decide on final designs. This felt like valuable practice for future commission and freelance work where producing multiple iterations of a design is integral to ensuring that clients are satisfied.