Much ado about SOMEthings.

(pic: Drew & I singing one last tune at the Starlite Lounge....)

I feel like I summited Everest last week.  I feel like I landed back in a mud ditch this week.  WORK.  Ups 'n downs 'n ups 'n downs 'n ups 'n.... I could ride the Coney Island Cyclone for days and feel more balanced.  Here's what I've been up to:

Last week, we shot our pilot for Bravo.  The show would be based on a weekly feature in New York Magazine, but I'm afraid I can't divulge more info on the concept as of yet.  I signed a confidentiality agreement, you know?  I will say this:  in the show, weekly events in pop culture and news are debated by a panel of "culture experts" and celebrities.  To bring the topics to life, I got to create hundreds of physical image composites for our casting sessions and over 300 high-res graphic compositions for the shoot.

We hired a British company and their 65" long SmartScreen to bring the magazine's qualities to a tactile level, and built a set that sparkled and was surrounded with studio cameras hidden behind turrets.  All in all, it was an amazing amount of work in preparation for a pilot.  My involvement with this project had begun at the casting level, with one of our producers forwarding names of potential panelists and hosts for which she needed video clips pulled and bios written.  Later, when the creative team came in, my bosses were great in getting me aligned with that side of the task at hand rather than the usual office management issues I handle.  I ultimately helped to save our company over $22,000 (or so I overheard) by creating high-resolution graphics in-house that corresponded to the topics our show was covering, which was a great feeling.  Another aspect of this project that was rewarding was to have some creative freedom in how I put images together and getting positive reactions from the crew and talent when they saw the graphics for the first time.  It was truly a challenging learning experience and I was thrilled for the chance to do something involving my favorite hobby: Photoshop.  The end didn't come easy, though -- I worked weekends and long, long hours leading up to our shoot.  At one point, during the week of our rehearsal and shoot, I didn't even leave the sound stage.  I showed up at 8:00 a.m. on a Wednesday and stayed up all night re-working last-minute changes, crashed for two hours on a green room couch, and woke up to participate in the pilot's shoot day.  I was exhausted after we wrapped our show, but glad to have been a part of  the team.

We won't know whether the pilot's been picked up until several months from now, so I'm back to my role of office lackey for the time being.  Needless to say, I'm having a rough transition back into my old job.  I'm managing interns, office supplies, cleaning, vendors, and assisting production and post production with various tasks as well as managing our network deliverables.  I had a minor emo-moment the other night when 9:30 rolled around and I'd been at work for over twelve hours and still had to deliver DVD's of our rough cuts to network execs at their homes across Manhattan.  

I had a long talk with my boss about my very obvious frustration since the switch back, and it was a good talk, but it really cemented in my mind that I need to pursue creative roles and stop wasting time in the position that is ultimately meant to grow into a coordinating role and then potentially an executive position (but not in a creative sense so much as logistical, monetary, and scheduling senses).  I've had a difficult time working under my current boss, who is only three years older than I and very sure of every detail of what she wants the workplace to be, down to font used on our office contact sheets.  Our talk revealed, at least, that she has good intentions with her controlling ways -- she's wanting to lay the groundwork for something big for this company's future, and she wants to do it in the style of her mentor and hero, our Executive-In-Charge.  That said, I have always done best when I have less oversight to bog me down, more flexibility in the way that I perform tasks, and more of a laid-back structure.  I didn't set out to work in a corporate environment, but  can see that this production company is aiming to turn itself into a small version of what I see everytime I pop into the VH1 Networks building -- cubicles and numbers.

(how I feel at work sometimes....)

I'm going to update my resume with my new graphics accomplishments and hope for the best, and the possibility of additional schooling is certainly crossing my mind a lot these days...I'd love to get website design and possibly even some industrial design into my bag of tricks, but I don't love the idea of dropping everything to get more loans piled on right now.  I'm hoping to look into some promising options at New York's SVA soon (apparently if you work there, you can take free classes, and I've heard great things about the programs!).  Meanwhile, I'm just biting my tongue and trying hard to ride out the changes around the office as we gear up for potentially five shows in production at once while being entirely understaffed.  I'm starting to think Saturday's Child will always work hard for a living, but I'm very lucky for the opportunities I've had so far, and I hope I can keep finding them.