June 22, 2006 - 12:25 PM

Work It! Work It Good!

Here's another reason why I've been lackadasical in updating (Lackadasical, upsydaisy girl). I started working nights as a freelance engineer for Technicolor's Interactive division. Hooray for me!

I think I've mentioned it before, and I know that I've told some of you, but the show I work on uses this particular branch of Technicolor to do the soundwork such as recording the dialogue, adding sound effects, and mixing all the sound elements for the final, ready-to-air episodes. But ours is one of the few T.V./Film projects they work on. Instead, their main focus is on video games. The line producer on my show have been talking to them about bringing me into the fold as an engineer in some capacity, and I had been going in a few days here, a couple days there in the morning, seeing what kind of work they do. They even gave me some sample dialogue to edit on an All-Star audio version of the Bible just to see how competent I am.

Well, finally, they felt comfortable enough with me that they called me in 4 weeks ago to do some clean up editing on dialogue for a military game we'll call "WH". I'm not typing the name here because I've subsequently seen it written up in various gaming magazines as one game that EVERYONE is looking forward to playing, so I don't want to have people googling it and stumbling upon this diary, especially with the confidentiality agreements I signed when I started working for Technicolor.

Anywho, I'm still working on the tv show from 9:30 until, well, whenever I can get away in the afternoon (usually the earliest is 5), and then, if they have work for me at Tech, I head over there and work for however long it takes me. My first day of work was a Wednesday on which I left the regular job around 5:30, got to Tech around 6 and worked until the mouse cursor disappeared from the screen at 9:50, preventing me from doing any further work. The next day, I edited from 6 until 8 PM, then scurried down to Hollywood to see Adrianne play (weird, just as I typed this sentence, an Adrianne song popped up on shuffle on my iPod). And then Friday, I was at Tech from 5:30 until 10:30.

The following week was so busy at the tv show that I couldn't go in to Technicolor until Friday, and at that point, they had no work for me to do. Which was fine by me, because I was bushed. I was working on the tv show until 8 on Monday, 9 on Tuesday, 11 on Wednesday; and while I got out at 6:30 on Thursday, I immediately turned around and headed to the Hotel Cafe with Matt to see Vienna Teng do a preview show for her new album coming out in July (look out for dates, y'all!).

Which brings us to last week. Nothing doing on Monday, but Tuesday night, I ended up backing-up sessions to the server for the Bible project at Technicolor until 2:45 AM. Wednesday night I did some editing and more session back-ups until midnight, and Thursday was spent editing dialogue for an english dub of a Japanese video game called Baito Hell. The english title is Work-Time Fun, or WTF for short. Seriously. I can not begin to tell you how deranged, goofy, and what-the-fuck-ish the game is. But I worked on it until midnight before crawling home. Friday I was relieved that they didn't have any projects for me to work on, which meant I could take Tony and Margaret to see Gabriel Mann (Margaret liked it, Tony, not so much).

It's been a tough balancing act, handling my night-time schedule. I want to say "yes" to every opportunity to work at Technicolor, and be there for 5 or 6 hours every time. You know, show them my eagerness to work there, my dedication, my willingness. But then I run into all these concerts that I've been planning to go to with other people, and they're all GOOD concerts. And strangely, where usually, I'd end up flaking out on more than half of them, I'm actually going to more than half of them. So several times it's been a matter of "how many hours can I squeeze in at Technicolor before I go to the show tonight", and a few times I've had to make the hard choice of one OR the other.

If I took a step back and looked at this rationally, I'd recognize that the smart course of action would be to skip every concert that's in conflict with the freelance work, because those are just passing amusements while this work could lead to something fulltime. But no one ever accused me of being not stupid.

Now Listening To : Eddi Reader-Mirmana
Random Thought : Have I got news for you.

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