Dan Villaire
Champlain Broadcasting student
Found his niche during internship
Champlain senior Dan Villaire is fast becoming a one-man production company — running the camera, doing all the editing and completing end-to-end production — for videos that will appear on Web sites for brands owned by K2Sports, an international company that manages 16 sporting goods and clothing brands, including LineSkis, Full Tilt Boots and Planet Earth Clothing.
For example, Dan recently shot approximately five hours of footage of DJ A Dog; a celebrity DJ in the Burlington area. “With DJ A Dog, a big part of his image is his skateboarding career, and I filmed him for a whole afternoon,” Dan reports. At the time of his interview, Dan had worked on 14 different videos — all two- to three-minute episodes posted on K2Sports brand Web sites. Dan had the skills to just jump in and deliver during the internship for his major in broadcasting because of his hands-on classes at Champlain. “I felt pretty confident, especially when we filmed one whole interview in HD, which was the first time I had done it on my own, but they had shown us how to do it in class.”
But what has really impressed Dan is the generosity and availability of his Champlain professors to help him with his internship projects. “I’m taking advanced video production this semester and I’ve brought some of the issues I had producing the videos in to my teacher, Bryan Agron, and he’s helped me out,” Dan explains. “When I had some issues exporting video, Bryan helped me work through it. Having someone from the professional world giving me feedback and helping me on my videos has been awesome.”
While Dan expected that his requisite internship for his major in Broadcasting would be interesting, he didn’t expect it to be life changing. “Before doing this internship, I wanted to get into the film industry and try to make movies,” Dan says. “But now that I’ve done this, it’s pushing me more to the action sports end of it — going out and filming skiing and skateboarding. I want to get into the action sports video field, and I feel like it’s more accomplishable than making movies. I discovered a whole other world I didn’t know about.”
Internship: K2 Sports (specifically LineSkis/Full Tilt Boots/Planet Earth Clothing)
Graphic Design work created by student Amanda Jones