Getting Started in Hollywood

After surviving my internship over the summer, as a multimedia major, I was still required to do one more before graduating.  My professor had written an article about an unusual movie that had been created using tools that I was familiar with, so he connected me with the people involved with that project.  I went down into Hollywood for a lunch interview with Jacob, who had been the post-production supervisor, and spent the rest of the day working on actual productive work with him.  He had an office at another facility, but a group of guys from the project were planning to start a permanent company based on the approach they took with the movie.  He also was currently doing a lot of work with Adobe, a company I was familiar with, since that had been the company giving us the grant for the new editing lab I built at college.

I had setup my class schedule to have three days a week available, so I was able to spend quite a bit of time working in Hollywood.  I didn't get paid yet, but they provided gas money and a cell phone.  My previous cell phone hadn't survived the Batman ride, at Magic Mountain that summer.  By the end of the school year I had enough hours accumulated to easily cover both internships I had needed, (meaning I could have skipped the first one) and a whole lot of new experience.

That environment was a much better fit for my skill set and experience, and I got quite involved with what was going on.  There wasn't really a "company" yet, and I was basically working with Jacob, but I met other people he worked with and connected with them as well.  He was being provided an office at another company, specializing in encoding for all of the major studios, so I got to know them as well, and was soon working for them separately.

I had purchase a very powerful computer over the summer, which became very useful for projects both for class and for work.  This allowed me to take work home with me, for days when I had class, and wouldn't make the commute down into Hollywood.

Back at school I had two major video projects I was working on.  The first was my honors project for multimedia, which was a sequel to Getting Lucky, now that people finally understood the intricacies of the original complicated script.  But by the time it got rewritten by outside editors, it was once again a totally different movie, which came to be called Queen of Hearts.  This time I directed, while someone else was supposed to take responsibility for producing it.  My agreement was that I was responsible for shooting it, but not for editing or finishing it.  This was because the last year's projects hadn't even gotten to that stage yet, based on the way the department was run.  And I had no intention of being tied to this project forever, like a boat anchor.  The end result wasn't as good as I hoped, because I am a much better producer than director, and a much better producer than any of the other students available.  They used my footage as the source for the editing class for many years, and I recently heard that they shot new scenes with some of the same actors, years later.  That made my footage a flashback from the past, with younger versions of the same actors, but I haven’t seen the results of any of that work.