The Seventh Cut

Week Seven at Zoo Media

This week felt like a mix of two completely different moods. On one hand, the work was slower and lighter in parts. On the other, one day stretched so long that it seemed to contain an entire week inside it.

Monday began with me arriving at the office extremely sleepy, which honestly set the tone for the day. It was a slow start, and most of my time went into working on another reel for Client 1. Nothing too dramatic happened, but some workdays are less about momentum and more about simply moving the edit forward bit by bit.

Tuesday was the exact opposite. It turned into one of those unexpectedly long 11 to 9 days that feels endless while you are in it and strangely satisfying once it is over. I had two major tasks to complete. The first was a reel for Client 2, but the footage had its own problems. The lighting was poor, the quality was not the best, and suddenly the edit became less about cutting clips and more about rescuing them. I sat with the graphic designer and worked on enhancing and generating better visuals, which took much longer than I had imagined. It was also my reminder that AI generation is not nearly as effortless as it looks from the outside. Once we finally had something usable, the designer moved on to creating supers and designing clips for me to stitch together.

The second half of the day introduced me to something entirely new. I worked on adapting two episodes of a show for different platforms, which meant selecting short sections using given timestamps, resizing them for platform specific formats, cutting footage through scene detection, and then manually reframing each clip so it sat properly within the frame. I had to do this for both Facebook and YouTube versions, across both episodes, while also adding platform specific legal slates. By the time I was done, it was 9 PM and I was more than ready to end the day.

Wednesday felt gentler by comparison. It was the first of April, which somehow made the day feel a little lighter already, and I mainly continued working on the reel for Client 1. After the marathon that Tuesday had been, the quieter pace was not unwelcome.

By Thursday, the week had taken on a slightly emotional tone. Work was still light, and I managed to close the reel for Client 1, but the bigger feeling of the day came from outside the timeline. One of the colleagues I had become friends with was leaving, and that changed the mood of the office. My friend and I went out to buy flowers and cake, and we all said our goodbyes properly. Later, we went out after office hours, which made the day feel less like a regular Thursday and more like a small send off wrapped inside a workday.

Friday was Good Friday, which meant a holiday and the beginning of a long weekend.

Looking back, this was one of those weeks that did not follow a single rhythm. It began sleepily, peaked in a very long and demanding workday, and ended with a mix of closure, celebration, and goodbye.

Some weeks teach you through new software tricks and technical tasks. Others leave you remembering the people, the mood, and the feeling of the office just as much as the work itself.