(2/3/19)
Today marks three weeks and one day since I’ve arrived in LA, and that means I have a whole week of new memories, experiences, tasks, and interactions to share. I’ll start off by saying that it was definitely interesting to see my friends at Penn State on social media and hear all about the freezing temperatures and class cancellations. I think I saw at minimum 15 videos on Snapchat of people throwing boiling water out their windows just to watch its violent reaction to the cold air.
This week at work was kind of all over the place, especially because my direct supervisor and the writer/producer that I had been shadowing were both on vacation. That could have meant a lot of free time at work on my part, but I’m the kind of person who needs to be constantly busy or else I will go crazy, so I definitely made the effort to reach out to people in different departments and see if there was anything I could sit in on or help out with. It began on Monday when I just overheard someone talking about a Disney Junior meeting and when she passed by my desk I asked her if it was something I could possibly observe. Next thing I knew I was sitting in a huge conference room listening to Disney Junior’s quarterly reports and descriptions of all of the new DJ programs in development. As they were presenting some of the new shows, there were some rough sketches and basic animations to display what the series would look like, and it was super interesting to see these programs at their very initial stages. It made me think hard about how long and tedious of a process it is to go from having just a concept to a full-fledged and complete animated series.
Some other interesting things that I did this week were: help pull clips from the show “Coop and Cami Ask the World” for social media spots, sit in on editing sessions and rough cut meetings, conduct a research project about diversity in workforce for the various design/animation vendors that Disney works with, watch a pre-screening of the new Kim Possible live action movie, and help to write a promo for an upcoming “Fancy Nancy” episode. To explain the title of this blog post, one of my favorite things about a typical workday is walking by any given employee’s desk and see them intently watching episodes of “Fancy Nancy” or “Puppy Dog Pals.” It’s especially funny when it’s a big, tough guy who looks like he could be a club bouncer but is instead trying to write promos for these Disney Channel shows!
One other cool opportunity I had was to be on set during a shoot that Disney had organized for a handwashing PSA. They brought in a bunch of kids from a talent agency to participate in this PSA that would air on all of Disney’s linear channels during flu season. It was crazy to see such an elaborate set-up for such a short spot: they had re-created a bathroom and had tons of lights and equipment rigged up. I sat in a director’s chair and felt really important even though I was doing absolutely nothing more than observing!
As per usual, I will end with outside of work adventures. On Friday my roommates and I went to the Universal Citywalk for a delicious Italian dinner and on Saturday a couple of us in the program went to a pre-screening of the new How to Train Your Dragon movie which was INCREDIBLE. I definitely sobbed more than I expected. Today we are getting ready to have a Super Bowl watching party complete with burgers, buff chick dip, and all the fixings. It’ll feel like a classic Penn State tailgate – and hopefully the Rams will win and we can get some cool reactions from the LA residents across our apartment complex.
