come and gone (wk.2)

End of week two!
This week found me in St. Louis broadcasting live to the internal VA employees in charge of home loans and grants for disabled vets. It was a feeling of accomplishment to see a script I worked on manifest before me.
Our journey unfolded as so:
Monday afternoon we flew into St. Louis and tuesday we spent the greater part of the day rehearsing and making script adjustments. I was responsible for matching up the teleprompter to the edits we made on the hard copy master-script. The crew and control room techs were really nice and very helpful. The studio where we filmed was in this VA hospital that looked straight out of a Saw movie or something–it was freaky. But I’m not sure  which is weirder: the fact that this hospital has a television studio or that the building  is creepy (and surrounded by a military cemetery).
Later, we parted ways and I being the youngest, decided to walk to the mall across the street from the hotel alone. Not very original or different, St. Louis! The only cool thing about that mall was that it had a Pollo Loco outside (which I unfortunately did not have a chance to visit).
Apparently while i was in town, there were all these flash floods, but all i heard was an awful thunderstorm in the middle of the night that woke me up.
I missed seeing and doing any of the tourist-y things St.Louis has to offer, but i expected as much from a business trip.
Wednesday we were in the studio by 8am and everyone that was going to be on-camera had their makeup done by a contracted make-up artist and we started shooting at 12p EST live.
I was really surprised because this time around it went a million times better than the rehearsals. The host, who happens to be my supervisor, ad libbed some questions in and the interaction between the panel and him added a lot to the information we were giving on loans and grants that is vital for disabled veterans.
The videos my office produces aren’t highly distributed in the mainstream market, these are meant to be for the lender, loan officer and veteran community, so i’m not expecting an emmy anytime soon. 🙂
It was really interesting and although I wasn’t on camera, i felt the rush of being on air and in front of cameras.
The link to the video will be up next week so i’ll update this.
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I’m working on some job leads and networking with a few people that i recently met. They were interested with my take on my degree and the need for me to expand my horizons and apply what I know into a different place, as i have in this case with video production.
But week two was definitely better, and the bed bug issue was pleasantly resolved! Here’s to an amazing week three!

time for some [more] change

Time for updates. turn. turn. turn. turn.
Today, i write from D.C., or shall I say Mclean VA. My internship’s housing was arranged in this suburb, or town about an hour outside of the city. I would be okay, if these past few days hadn’t been so hellish. For one, there’s been a bed bug issue specifically in my room which i share. And secondly, the organization will not let me out of this place. The smell of fumigation alone is one to give me nausea, but for some reason it cannot make those pests budge. I am desperately seeking to get out of here, especially since the new place would be 2 Metro stops from work.
So far the internship itself has slowly been progressing into something I am enjoying. I just started this week, so of course, as with most new jobs, the first day is a mish-mash of forms, cheesy training vids, and office tours where the names of co-workers are instantaneously forgotten. It doesn’t help that I’m uber-terrible with names.
Aside from that, I’ve been given the opportunity to try something new. I had only played with the idea of video production before, and now I’m doing it. There’s little of what I did in my last internship, but I love the editing part of my job. With a script so long, it’s so easy to type in mistakes or not realize that sentences make little sense until read-through. So one of my responsibilities is to make sure that doesn’t happen, and if it does–fix it before the rehearsal.
Script editing, video splicing and looking over potential scripts are a few of the duties I have undertaken these past two days. Yesterday had the potential to be disasterous, but I can’t let the bed bugs get the best of me, so I cranked in a 10-hour shift that felt like a five-hour one. I buzzed away the entire time.
Although I’m not too sure I was made for the cubicle life, yesterday was a productive one in that little box.
I’m working on some projects at the moment for after this, but we’ll see where any of it will lead. No word on whether I’ll be in El Paso in 2 months or stay here, or even take off somewhere else. Life is funny like that I suppose. Not easy, just funny.
The time to get ready for work is now. I have an hour-or-so commute ahead of me.. joy.

And it turns out one of my professors called me “rad” when recommending me for the program. Haha. Thanks Dr. P