The first week.

Well, it's been four days since I moved out here and I've already gone through my first week of work. There's no dodging it, my internship is awesome. the only thing that could possibly make it better at this point would be to get paid, haha. Seriously though, I'm working in the TV guide building on Hollywood Blvd, right across the street from Grauman's Chinese Theatre! Yeah, tight, I know. So i'm right in the middle of the hollywood bowl and probably the best part is that I only have to drive 15 minutes to get to work, but it takes me 5 minutes to get up the parking garage with my truck because it's so tiny...
My first day was started off weird just because I had to grab my car keys to go take a shower in the main house. It's gonna take some getting use to, but I figure by the end of the summer I'm going to have a high tolerance for needing to go to the bathroom, because right now it's kind of like 'how bad do you have to go?' haha. Once I got to Trailer Park though, everything got set in motion. I met my boss, my supervisor (yes they're different) and the rest of the Production Assistants, which is essentially what I am. Talk to George, my boss, it sounds like I'm in for an awesome summer. He told me the first few weeks will be kind of a drag because they want me to learn the work flow around the office, but once I have that down, they'll start trusting me to do other things and eventually let me sit in with editors and observe. I told him I was also interested in graphic design type things and he was really excited that I knew what I was talking about. I'm only at my internship for 3 days a week and George told me what he'd try to do is make it so that I'm with the editors for 2 of those days and with the graphics guys for the other day. Towards the end of the summer, he also said that they'd probably let me get in one of the edit bays and be able to cut together some of my own stuff (FINGERS CROSSED!!!!). Overall, I'm super excited. Just the prospect of that is enough to get me through the other grunt work they have me doing.

Basically all my grunt work involves answering phones, making labels, checking in and out tapes, doing quality control on outgoing projects, getting coffee and food for producers (to some extent), and pretty much anything else they can think of. Tuesday (my second day) I was learning how to operate the patch panel in the machine room when a producer came in and asked if I was the intern. I introduced myself and found out that he was one of the producers in the video game department... They needed another person to play a new video game that's about to be released to help make a TV spot for it. AWESOME! So for 8 hours, I did nothing but sit in this guys office, on a conference call with him and everyone else playing, and played this game. He directed us and told us to do things and filmed it in the game. So even though my face won't be on TV, in a round about way, I will be. haha.

Yesterday was a lot of grunt work. We're having to get ready for an MPAA audit on friday which means lots of house cleaning and many trips to this place called the vault. Part of what Trailer Park offers is storage for films and TV shows, so they have this room on the 1st floor, only accessible by stairs (everything else is on the 6th, 7th, 11th, and 12th), where all of these tapes are stored. If tapes aren't currently in use in a project they must be in the vault, which means carrying crates of these things down the stairs, coming back up and getting more, then organizing them. that was fun. we didn't get close to finishing, so that's what they're doing all day today...and guess who has off...this guy! Unfortunately for the other intern, who's a pretty cool guy, he gets to deal with all of that.

Anyways, that was my week up to this point. Now I'm trying to figure out what to do for the rest of the day. I still need to make my way to the beach, but Jace seems ready to go hiking, so we'll see. One more thing. I applied for a part time job at Fossil and Oakley so I can possibly make some monies. I've got an interview with Oakley tomorrow and I'm still waiting to hear back from Fossil, so keep you're fingers crossed. This would really help me meet people closer to my age around this place!