Mother of the Year contest

We aired the finalists and winner of our Mother of the Year contest, the same contest which I had been helping to 'judge' a while back.  I say 'judge' because a group of us were assigned to wade through the thousands of submissions and give the green light to some, so producers could wade through those green lights and narrow it down even further.  We were mainly looking for who followed the rules, and who included a good picture.  Like I said earlier, I couldn't power through it as well as other big, onerous projects, because many of these submissions came from families who were struggling with diseases and finances, which made me a little depressed after three or four hours.

Our three finalists and their families were excited to be here, and it was contagious.  They were all so nice, and easy to work with, my job was to lead them from area to area until it was time for our segment to air.  I also ended up unwinding the giant check they would win, and flattening it on the floor with some heavy boxes so it would become rigid.  I hadn't ever handled a big TV check like that, so it was fun. I also learned that it was made of some plastic material instead of paper or card, which was sort of surprising.

I expected the family who won to be ecstatic and scream for joy, but instead they became very emotional. The mother was shocked and started to tear up, which made the father and their two boys weepy. They were all outgoing and excited before the segment, but you could tell that they were such a solid family unit once they won. They weren't crying because they won the money, but crying out of love and gratitude for their mom/wife, and for the recognition of something they all wholeheartedly believed: that they have a fantastic lady in their lives.  Even afterwards, and until I was finished with helping out, the family didn't say anything about what they would spend the money on.  Instead, they reminisced about times when their mom had been stellar as a mother or wife.

Tax forms and Cannes research

 Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

Today was a full and fulfilling day, I was happy to be busy from start to end.  I came in early to help with a musical segment, and the band was rehearsing when I arrived.  The lead singer was Rita Wilson (Tom Hank's wife), and she was accompanied by two guitarists, a bassist, drummer, pianist (who was working two keyboards simultaneously) and another singer.  My job was to have them fill out some tax forms before they performed.  I recognized a few forms because my buddy back in Cincinnati had worked at Jackson Hewitt, but learning what to have them fill out wasn't the hard part as it turned out; making sure each form was complete was the bigger problem.  After three attempts at turning the forms in, only to find out some parts were missing or we had the wrong type of form, we were able to get everything in order.

I also finished up doing some research for the 2012 Cannes film festival.  We had a fact sheet from 2010 which included general info about Cannes and the festival, and info about that festival.  I needed to update the outdated info, and add any other interesting facts and figures to the sheet.  To me, one of the more interesting facts I found was that the city of Cannes spends 600,000+ Euros a year to reclaim 25,000 square meters worth of sand from the sea, which makes sense considering how tourism is integral to the city's economy.

Otherwise, I finished up outlining the scenes for Act II of my spec script, and I planned to finish the rest of the scenes tomorrow.

The one useful call

Control room today was more productive for me than usual, I left my iPad at home so I wasn't tempted to work on crosswords.  Instead, I worked on my South Park spec script, and I finished the basic outline for it.  Tomorrow I'll figure out the 23-26 scenes that I need to flesh out  the script, and then it pretty much writes itself.

I did get a useful caller today, the first one ever.  Besides people looking for transfers, calls which are obviously useful, most viewer calls are about story ideas.  Most story ideas are pretty bad; but of the at least hundred or so story ideas I've heard so far, I've passed along three, and none of them were picked up.  Today, however, I had a gimme, a caller with an offer that seemed like we would have an obvious interest in it.  I sent her info along with the situation along to a producer, and she followed up with a call.  I felt like a useful cog today, instead of just a functioning cog, which was a nice feeling.  Not that what I do on a daily basis isn't useful, but I don't often get to directly affect what will air before anyone else knows about it.  I really felt like the point of the shovel on this one, whereas I'm used to feeling like the shaft.

Sacha Baron Cohen, Ann Curry, Suzanne Somers and the death of the Fat Cat

As the title suggests, today was a busy day.  We had Sacha Baron Cohen, or the Supreme Leader, in today as a guest, promoting his new movie The Dictator.  He arrived with some bodacious bodyguards, and in classic dictator fashion (I suppose?) was permitted to roam around the building until his interview with Matt Lauer.  Luckily for me, as he's one of the few celebrities I'd like to see, he ended up commandeering the control room for a segment promo. Matt introduced the plug by explaining that he'd shot our executive producer and was now running the show, which I admittedly chuckled at.

I spent most of today transcribing a phone interview with Suzanne Somers, however, which was quite interesting.  I was doubling down by doing that and working the front desk, so I was interrupted often by callers, but I was able to finish the transcription by the early afternoon.  The most pleasant interruption came from Ann Curry, however, who jokingly asked if I was working or listening to music while I was transcribing - I had my roommate's Beats headphones on, which are certainly overkill for this assignment, but the only thing I had to use.  I told her about the interview, and she said she was going to interview her later this week, and it must be the pre-interview.  We chatted a bit about what she'd be interviewing her for, and it didn't hit me until afterwards how candid and pleasant that conversation was.  I guess it shouldn't surprise me at this point, but even the biggest names I meet here at NBC are very down to earth.

In other news, that 39 pound cat died today.  It reportedly was having breathing problems.  It goes to show there is a limit on how fat a cat can be, a limit which transcends (or consumes?) the other 8 lives they usually get.

Lunch with Ernie

Today was one of those days that will probably prove to be a formative experience in my career or life.  I spent the morning watching a few episodes of Mary Tyler Moore in order to prepare for my lunch with Ernie Angstadt, a producer who I met a few weeks ago that has taken a special interest in me because we both share a special interest in sitcoms.

We chatted for an hour and a half about all sorts of things - from my experience growing up to current and past sit-coms, as well as the series idea I came up with a few years back.  He wanted to see the episode I produced for my last internship at Waycross community TV, and I could kick myself for not keeping a copy.  I gave my only copy to somebody at OU when I transferred as proof that I did the internship, so if he doesn't have it, hopefully Waycross does somewhere in it's storage.  My only other option is to see if the footage is on some tapes that I still have, and re-edit the project.

One of the useful bits of advice I heard from Ernie was that I need to be on the west coast if I want to work on pre-production for sitcoms.  I thought that New York was the place to be for TV, and while that's true of production, he said that all the writers are on the west coast.  I suppose I'll need to apply for the west coast Page program as well.

He also advised that while it's good that I'm learning a bunch about production and analysis of shows, I need to not loose that little nugget of intuition about what will 'work' in terms of being funny.  This resonated with me.  I feel like I had a good grasp on that nugget in my first two years as an undergrad, but during the harder work of catching up and preparing to become professional of the last two years, that piece of me has taken a back seat.  I just plain and simple need to start writing again.  I'm planning on finishing my South Park spec script in the next month or so, and I want to start watching Big Bang Theory or Happy Endings to potentially spec one of those; Ernie praised both of those shows highly, and I trust his judgement.

Between the life advice, career advice, and the casual but pertinent and interesting conversations we had, I feel rejuvenated.  I feel like I've reconnected with my base: my love of story and humor.  Since I've been here, I've been so focused on the next step that I've started to compromise on narrative writing, the thing that made me want to study and eventually work in video production in the first place.  I'm planning on spending more time after work watching these shows and working on my own projects, instead of playing video games, a sink that drains most of my free time.

Legs and logs

Today was a control room day, and not a bad one to be scheduled for.  The show featured a six year old who could play the piano like a pro - and could play any song once he's heard it a few times.  He was bright and cheery little ham, perfect for the program.  We also had Kelly Osborne as a guest on our Today's Professionals segment, and she was also a star.  Like somebody in the control room said, she's not afraid to speak her mind but she also has an appropriate degree of discretion.

I logged a bit more than an hour and a half of tapes - so in real time, it took me about three hours.  The tapes were pretty thick, in that they had many different images and sound bytes to log, which translates to a bunch of text.  Luckily there was a segment where the three Apollo astronauts were waiting in the mobile quarantine facility to speak with Nixon for about 15 minutes, so that went by in real time.  I also ended up running around 30 rock to pick up and deliver packages.  Those trips got me out of having to deliver something across town, however, which was lucky because I didn't bring my coat and it started raining today.

Resume sent, Graeter's had.

I was happy to see that the person who I sent my resume to last week for a quick look over and recommendation replied to my email this morning.  This was the last thing I needed to happen before asking my supervisor to send it up to the desk.  Hopefully, with these two recommendations (and they both used to be Pages), and with this internship and my attractive potential start date, I will get a phone call from the desk.  The phone call will be a means to confirm that I'm who I say I am on my resume, so not that I'm looking past that, but I'm not as concerned about the call as much as the panel interview.  I've been looking at suit jackets and shoes, a must for the interview, as somehow I lost those things in my move here.  Luckily, my cousin is in town, she knows all the best shopping spots and she said she'd help me pick something out on Thursday.

Otherwise, I had a pleasant hometown surprise this afternoon: somebody brought Graeter's ice cream to share with everybody!  I was also pleased to hear the positive murmurs from people trying it out, it makes me think that Graeter's can stand up to other ice cream.  I had some of the black raspberry chip, my favorite, and was fortunate to unearth a huge chunk of chocolate.