(no subject)
Lesse, been about a week since I last posted...
Work this week was a pretty even mix of exciting and boring. Much of my time was taken up by some fairly menial work. One of the guys on the evolution project forwarded me all the stuff people had sent him for possible scientists to interview for the subject matter of every episode of the series, to act as recurring characters. I sorted through it, put it into a spreadsheet, and tracked down photos, specialties, bios, and contact information of everybody. I also did more work on a spreadsheet to organize all the masters for Evolution and started work transcribing an interview tape by some fish paleontologist. (Transcribing in this sense being watching a copy of the interview and typing up everything said in word, since they don't have a script for interviews, as well as noting all timecodes and stuff.
Had a few interesting trips out, though. Monday morning I had to get into the office half an hour early to go on a road trip. Car service picked me up, we went out to Brooklyn to the apartment of one of the producers on Evolution that had just gotten back from Costa Rica, load up the van with a jillion pounds of equipment (I never counted, but I think it was in the range of 10 bags or so, ranging from very light to extremely heavy, and nice shoulder straps to tiny handles that dig into your knuckles.) Then she takes the subway to the office while me and the car service guy haul it all up to Hotcam equipment rental in the garment district. I had to get all ten bags from the car, through the freight elevator, up to their office by myself. Sucked. Once there, it turned out that one box was supposed to go back to our office and two others and a missing tripod were supposed to go to ANOTHER rental place one block up. I go there and they take the other stuff, tell us we're missing a couple little things, but not the tripod. Mysterious.
Then Tuesday I was suddenly called off work with an emergency trip to work out a kink with a piece of sound equipment for a crew leaving in three hours. I take it to Gotham Sound, sit waiting for our contact for like half an hour, and then spend another hour watching the various people stand around puzzling over and insulting it as a radioshack piece of crap. Eventually they figured out that the timecode signal was going into the monitor headphones and fixed it by chaining together like five or six assorted adaptors.
Wednesday I had a trip to the discovery channel offices in midtown. Was kind of interested in seeing them, but all I got to see was the sign above the security guy who referred me to the messenger entrance around the side, where I was intercepted by their own messengers, who took my package to run upstairs.
I also got what could be construed as my first paycheck! The internship is technically unpaid, but I do get a $20 stipend per day to compensate me for lunch and subway, etc, three days a week, making $60 a week. However, since my meals generally consist of a bagel and soda from the office kitchen for breakfast and basically free food from the NYU dining halls, and an unlimited use metrocard (which I really kinda need with all this running around) is $76 a month, it's can basically be construed as pay.
I had my first round of essays due this week, which were kind of rough. I put them off too long, doing each the night before. One in Hong Kong Cinema on masculinity in The One Armed Swordsman, a Zhang Che film from...the 60's I think? Promising young martial artist gets arm removed by spiteful female student who loves him and he takes it like she had cut off another piece of anatomy. I'm kind of ashamed at how long it took me to see the symbolism in his changing styles and switching to his father's old sword, which had been broken in two. The other one was on the original Godzilla, which is really a surprisingly good and deep picture for something that started such a campy franchise, genre, and style of special effects. Neither were really my best work, particularly my Godzilla paper, but I hope it will balance out with both my teachers having no TAs and not speaking English as a first language.
This week in class, had a talk from the people at the Tisch office of career development, who will now be sending me email about jobs in NY and LA for the rest of my life, watched Sansho the Bailiff in Japanese Cinema, and Yojimbo in Hong Kong Cinema, despite the fact that it is Japanese. In any event, it's still such a good movie that in honor of it, I took my arms out of the sleeves of my coat and instead used them to stroke my chin thoughtfullly.
John had his interview with the Japanese on Thursday, and then took off for D.C. so that I still don't know how it went. They could have asked to test him by a sumo match and I still wouldn't know. Alas. Instead I killed time on Thursday afternoon by going to see Jumper. It was not exactly a great movie, let's just say that. They realized the concept of the teleportation and such really well, but it was pretty rife with plot holes and dialogue on the level of Michael Bay's Transformers. And that's to say nothing of Hayden Christenson's acting. Before, I thought he was just a bad actor. Now I realize that he is such a bad actor that he poisons the talent of everyone he acts with, the actors who play him at different ages, and the writer writing him. His character was a godawful piece of crap. I think that they were trying to make him realistic and human, showing him robbing banks and such, but instead they just kind of made him the biggest jackass in all of film. Not just his jackass actions, like lazily sitting on the couch watching people on TV trapped on roofs by a flood, even his general demeanor just makes you wanna punch him in the face. A lot.
However, the movie was decent enough, in a crappy-action-movie way. And Samuel L. Jackson can't be too bad. I'd gotten only like an hour, hour and a half of sleep the night before thanks to my Godzilla essay, but I stayed awake, so I'll just let that speak to the film's credit. Also, it had the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that had just been released that morning. Not the best done trailer I've ever seen, it was a little too slow and one liner-y, but the film does look quite good, like Lucas has failed at tainting anything other than the title.
Anime club was pretty empty, since most people had gone to Katsucon. I didn't stay very long.
Weather's been ick this week. Monday it was in the low teens before a considerable wind chill, Tuesday was moderately heavy snow, Wednesday was rain. Yuck. More snow expected this weekend, too.
Today I was taken by a mood and went out shopping, picking up loads of kitcheny stuff. Knives, a mixing bowl, spatulas, dishtowels, an electric kettle for tea, yeast, self rising flour, vanilla extract, so on and so forth. I set out with the goal of baking some bread this evening, but I took too long, got too hungry, and the Jubilee mart didn't seem to carry any nonstick cooking spray stuff, so it'll wait till later this weekend. I settled for some pasta instead. Have since been sitting around filling in more data for stuff on itunes. Pretty boring, since mostly all that's left is the kinda bad songs from the various DDR games I have through stepmania and ambient soundtrack stuff for 16 bit Final Fantasy games.
Work this week was a pretty even mix of exciting and boring. Much of my time was taken up by some fairly menial work. One of the guys on the evolution project forwarded me all the stuff people had sent him for possible scientists to interview for the subject matter of every episode of the series, to act as recurring characters. I sorted through it, put it into a spreadsheet, and tracked down photos, specialties, bios, and contact information of everybody. I also did more work on a spreadsheet to organize all the masters for Evolution and started work transcribing an interview tape by some fish paleontologist. (Transcribing in this sense being watching a copy of the interview and typing up everything said in word, since they don't have a script for interviews, as well as noting all timecodes and stuff.
Had a few interesting trips out, though. Monday morning I had to get into the office half an hour early to go on a road trip. Car service picked me up, we went out to Brooklyn to the apartment of one of the producers on Evolution that had just gotten back from Costa Rica, load up the van with a jillion pounds of equipment (I never counted, but I think it was in the range of 10 bags or so, ranging from very light to extremely heavy, and nice shoulder straps to tiny handles that dig into your knuckles.) Then she takes the subway to the office while me and the car service guy haul it all up to Hotcam equipment rental in the garment district. I had to get all ten bags from the car, through the freight elevator, up to their office by myself. Sucked. Once there, it turned out that one box was supposed to go back to our office and two others and a missing tripod were supposed to go to ANOTHER rental place one block up. I go there and they take the other stuff, tell us we're missing a couple little things, but not the tripod. Mysterious.
Then Tuesday I was suddenly called off work with an emergency trip to work out a kink with a piece of sound equipment for a crew leaving in three hours. I take it to Gotham Sound, sit waiting for our contact for like half an hour, and then spend another hour watching the various people stand around puzzling over and insulting it as a radioshack piece of crap. Eventually they figured out that the timecode signal was going into the monitor headphones and fixed it by chaining together like five or six assorted adaptors.
Wednesday I had a trip to the discovery channel offices in midtown. Was kind of interested in seeing them, but all I got to see was the sign above the security guy who referred me to the messenger entrance around the side, where I was intercepted by their own messengers, who took my package to run upstairs.
I also got what could be construed as my first paycheck! The internship is technically unpaid, but I do get a $20 stipend per day to compensate me for lunch and subway, etc, three days a week, making $60 a week. However, since my meals generally consist of a bagel and soda from the office kitchen for breakfast and basically free food from the NYU dining halls, and an unlimited use metrocard (which I really kinda need with all this running around) is $76 a month, it's can basically be construed as pay.
I had my first round of essays due this week, which were kind of rough. I put them off too long, doing each the night before. One in Hong Kong Cinema on masculinity in The One Armed Swordsman, a Zhang Che film from...the 60's I think? Promising young martial artist gets arm removed by spiteful female student who loves him and he takes it like she had cut off another piece of anatomy. I'm kind of ashamed at how long it took me to see the symbolism in his changing styles and switching to his father's old sword, which had been broken in two. The other one was on the original Godzilla, which is really a surprisingly good and deep picture for something that started such a campy franchise, genre, and style of special effects. Neither were really my best work, particularly my Godzilla paper, but I hope it will balance out with both my teachers having no TAs and not speaking English as a first language.
This week in class, had a talk from the people at the Tisch office of career development, who will now be sending me email about jobs in NY and LA for the rest of my life, watched Sansho the Bailiff in Japanese Cinema, and Yojimbo in Hong Kong Cinema, despite the fact that it is Japanese. In any event, it's still such a good movie that in honor of it, I took my arms out of the sleeves of my coat and instead used them to stroke my chin thoughtfullly.
John had his interview with the Japanese on Thursday, and then took off for D.C. so that I still don't know how it went. They could have asked to test him by a sumo match and I still wouldn't know. Alas. Instead I killed time on Thursday afternoon by going to see Jumper. It was not exactly a great movie, let's just say that. They realized the concept of the teleportation and such really well, but it was pretty rife with plot holes and dialogue on the level of Michael Bay's Transformers. And that's to say nothing of Hayden Christenson's acting. Before, I thought he was just a bad actor. Now I realize that he is such a bad actor that he poisons the talent of everyone he acts with, the actors who play him at different ages, and the writer writing him. His character was a godawful piece of crap. I think that they were trying to make him realistic and human, showing him robbing banks and such, but instead they just kind of made him the biggest jackass in all of film. Not just his jackass actions, like lazily sitting on the couch watching people on TV trapped on roofs by a flood, even his general demeanor just makes you wanna punch him in the face. A lot.
However, the movie was decent enough, in a crappy-action-movie way. And Samuel L. Jackson can't be too bad. I'd gotten only like an hour, hour and a half of sleep the night before thanks to my Godzilla essay, but I stayed awake, so I'll just let that speak to the film's credit. Also, it had the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that had just been released that morning. Not the best done trailer I've ever seen, it was a little too slow and one liner-y, but the film does look quite good, like Lucas has failed at tainting anything other than the title.
Anime club was pretty empty, since most people had gone to Katsucon. I didn't stay very long.
Weather's been ick this week. Monday it was in the low teens before a considerable wind chill, Tuesday was moderately heavy snow, Wednesday was rain. Yuck. More snow expected this weekend, too.
Today I was taken by a mood and went out shopping, picking up loads of kitcheny stuff. Knives, a mixing bowl, spatulas, dishtowels, an electric kettle for tea, yeast, self rising flour, vanilla extract, so on and so forth. I set out with the goal of baking some bread this evening, but I took too long, got too hungry, and the Jubilee mart didn't seem to carry any nonstick cooking spray stuff, so it'll wait till later this weekend. I settled for some pasta instead. Have since been sitting around filling in more data for stuff on itunes. Pretty boring, since mostly all that's left is the kinda bad songs from the various DDR games I have through stepmania and ambient soundtrack stuff for 16 bit Final Fantasy games.