Bridgewater Triangle

One of the projects I am working on here at my internship has to do with something called psychic archeology, which is exactly what it sounds like. Basically, psychics will travel to different archeological sights around the country to help archeologists out with things that they could not possibly know on their own from concrete materials or evidence. The psychic archeologists will give their insights and intuitions and the regular archeologists will use those clues to help them find new discoveries. This is how it is supposed to work. However, I am pretty sure the psychics either just tell the archeologists things that are already common knowledge or they are just plain wrong. Either way, I was able to go on a pretty interesting outing yesterday to a place called the Bridgewater Triangle.
The Bridgewater Triangle is an area in Massachusetts where countless reports of paranormal sightings have occurred. I am not sure what the paranormal has to do with psychics but I was happy to go along for the rise. Basically, my three colleagues and I went to the area to find out if any of the myths about the place were true. If they seemed to have any real weight to them, then we could potentially try to fit the Triangle into an episode with the psychic archeologists. We first went to the Hockamock swamp, a large swamp within the triangle which means, “place where the spirit dwells.” I have to admit that the swamp was very creepy. It was a very damp, rainy day which added to the gloomy atmosphere, but even without the weather the Hockamock swamp is one of the most popular Halloween destinations for teenagers. We didn’t actually see paranormal activity of course, but we decided to shoot some b-roll since the locations had a lot of character and would be interesting to look at on screen.
Throughout the day we met with a few townspeople and asked them about the local legends- all of them knew all the details about the myths. There are “ghost lights”, animal mutations, “black helicopters” (a term I still don’t really understand), and even murders. I would have to say talking to people n the town was the most interesting part of the day. It was great to see the kind of enthusiasm people had about their town and its history. We’re not sure what to take out of yesterday but at the very least we shot some good footage and met with a few characters who could be interesting interviewees in the future.

Internship- 3 main jobs

I have been at my internship for about a month now and I feel like I am really starting to get the hang of it. Basically, I am helping to develop and market different new projects that are in the works for the company. Until recently, the company has only done documentary films. But, they are beginning to look into real life television series for channels like The Sundance Channel or BBC or PBS although PBS has no money to give. There are three main projects that they have had me working on, all of which are actually really interesting.
The first, and the one I spend the most time on is about social entrepreneurship. They would like to create a show which would follow different young social entrepreneurs who have inventions or ideas to bring to the developing world. These seemingly small ideas and technology to impoverished countries and help to implement them so that they themselves can make a profit but more importantly to help the country with their major needs. I have been doing a lot of research to see what kinds of young social entrepreneurs are out there. One interesting woman who we have met with a few times now is named Anna Jaffe. She is the creator of Global Cycle Solutions which takes a simple bike and turns it into a corn sheller to help people do this daily task 20 times faster.
Another project we are working on would be based around Berklee College of Music which is right around the corner from here. The show would follow seniors who are aspiring musicians in their journeys to become professionals. This would not be your typical reality show though. We would follow students as they learn from a star studded faculty many of whom have won Grammys; we would watch them striving to make record deals, or just find gigs around the city; and we would, I think, just learn a lot about what inspires and challenges them. I like this project a lot and hope it goes through. However, some consultants who have come in to determine which pitches would make successful shows didn’t really seem to like this idea as much.
The third thing I am working on is about psychic archeology. This one is pretty strange and I will write more about it once I figure out what it is and why we are interested in it. Some of my colleges just got back from Toronto to show our film, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. I am very curious to hear about the trip and how the fim was received.

First post/ summer overview

Hello Everyone! Sorry it has taken me a while to get my act together. I have had an extremely busy summer so far; I can’t believe we are already half way through June. I thought I would, in this first post, just give a general overview about what I will be writing about in this blog. I should also probably tell you a little about me. I am 22 years old, going to be a senior this coming year and I live in Massachusetts. The reason I am so old for my grade is that I took a year off before coming to Loyola to travel. That would have been a much better time to start a travel writing blog actually…I have 5 siblings the oldest of whom is 32 and the youngest just turned 2. It is quite the range as you can see. In terms of the blog, I am not sure yet if I want to focus more on my work or if I want to focus more on traveling/ what I will be doing on my won for fun. Any suggestions about what you all think would be more interesting would be great!

For work, I have actually found a really awesome internship here in Boston. I am working at a documentary film company called Northern Light. They have my doing all kinds of things but I am mainly working on developing and researching new projects and then also helping with marketing them to the public and different investors and studios. Its pretty relevant to what I want to get into after school, and it also seems like they really need us interns which always helps. I have not had to make a single pot of coffee yet, so so far I would call it a success.

In terms of what I will be doing with my time off, I will mainly be going between here and Cape Cod and western Massachusetts. My family lives in a few different places, so I am always moving around to see them. I will hopefully be able to do some more interesting things besides just staying here in Mass. I am pretty sure I’m going to go to Baltimore a few times to see friends (also not too exciting since its where I spend the school year), but also maybe to France and Spain for a week or two. Not sure yet how that will work, but I will keep you all updated.