Friday December 30th

Today marked exactly one week until the show. On Thursday, we decided that all of the characters should have a costume change for the second act as the majority of the characters had a change. I did a few more pulls from the costume shop to complete the look of each character. Some of this involved a little bit of buying from Goodwill such as the gansey, a kind of fisherman's sweater, that one of the characters wears. While I purchased one at Goodwill I had to readjust because the first was in too dark of a color. I also found the perfect shoes for the narrator of the story that will work perfectly. A lot of the characters need small little adjustments that will be done this week, and I'll put the finishing touches on the jacket then too. The jacket itself is done, fully-lined and everything!

Jack's Uniform

Today ended my search to find a white British military coat for our character Jack and began my adventure in making a new coat for Jack! Overall the materials were relatively cheap, the lining, interfacing, twill fabric, and notions came to about only 40 dollars. A good price for a coat that will probably get used more than once in shows. I have about half of it done right now. I also went in to see the director today to talk about the costumes which lead to all the character wearing their costumes for practice. The director loved the overall look of the show and commended me on making the sisters look like a tight-knit family. I was pleased to hear that he liked the look of the show so far even though there were crucial pieces like Jack's jacket missing. Hopefully I will have the jacket done by Friday, but it will be surely done by Monday at the latest. We're coming up onto dress rehearsal week for me which should be pretty stress-free as most of the characters already have their costumes put together and just need nips and tucks here and there. There definitely are a lot of modifications that need to be changed before dress rehearsal week, but that's the price we pay for pulling from stock. I believe it's worth it though! Saves the department lots of money and keeps me on budget!

2 weeks until the show!

This weekend marked the 2 week mark until the opening show. While the actors are getting a bit nervous, so am I! It's scary thinking about how little time I have to costume the show, basically about 3 weeks. We did all the final pulling on Friday and began to wrap everything up, yet there are still a few pieces that need to be discussed. The general's coat is still causing great concern, as I'm not sure where we can attain such a coat and renting one might not get here in time. The show being so close is getting nerver-racking. It may come down to having to make a coat similar to the director's instructions which is only scary because it would have to be done over a weekend! The pulls for the costumes went well, and I had another meeting with the director to show him what I had purchased for the characters and pulled. The characters are all dressed in similar muted tones although I would have loved to have a completely sepia-toned set of costumes, it's not practical in budget and time constraints to go by that strict of a look. However, the muted will look very good on stage and accurate to the time period. Within the next few days we will be working on trying the costumes on and possibly pulling different pieces if some do not work out. Then the week after that will be dress rehearsal week!

Thursday, December 22nd

Today was my last day at my internship…kind of. After talking to Renata a few days ago, we decided that I'm going to come back next semester to do another semester of work. So I was sadder thinking that I wouldn't be coming back, but now that I know I am, it's just like taking a winter break from school and coming right back. For my last day, I did everything that I normally do. Things don't change very often around here. I archived Monte's emails, completed Renata's red marked emails, opened all of Monte's mail, posted the artist news stories, and mailed out some important documents. Even though I do the same thing almost every day, I have learned a lot at this internship and I'm really exciting to come back next semester and learn even more. Next year we're working with the T.V. show The Voice and the movie The Hunger Games, so we'll be extremely busy. I'll miss Universal and New York while I'm home over the next month or so, but I can't wait to get back to work in 2012.

The week in review!

It definitely has been one crazy week! I went into the class yesterday to work on costumes again with the class and this time worked with a small group of three. I had finished all my renderings for the costumes, which turned out well and will be presented in a glass display in the lobby. The class' renderings did affect my renderings and I tried to integrate pieces into the show that they wanted to see. On Wednesday we finished the pulling for the class and did a few try-ons. These went well, the only problem we ran into was one character's costume, but I discovered a perfect coat for the character for only 20 dollars at my other job (Old Navy) that would work perfectly for the character. The most amazing thing is that the coat is just what the class was looking for as well! For anything that I haven't been able to pull, I've been able to search Goodwill or clearance at stores to find. Although I haven't executed a costume yet, I feel I may have to for the coat for one of the characters. The character is supposed to be a general who acted as a missionary in Africa for around 20 years. He comes back to be with the sisters (Kate, Chris, Agnes, Maggie, and Rose) in the play. The general needs a sort of military like coat, preferably in white. While the costume shop at my school is expansive, it does not have any sort of military coat like this. I think I will contact the costume director at the Des Moines Playhouse to see if she has any similar items. Hopefully I will be able to pull final looks today and tomorrow to be able to show the director again Friday.

Wednesday, December 21st

Today was my second to last day at work so I did a lot of wrapping up. I entered a lot of the papers that Renata needed for the internship and I had to turn in my pass and i.d. Tomorrow I will just have the front desk call up to the 8th floor to have someone let me in. I still had to do all the normal tasks like archiving Monte's emails, going through Renata's red marked emails, and opening Monte's mail. We got a new shelving unit delivered for the back closet, that some how managed to stay clean over the last few weeks. We put it together a took a whole bunch of the Rolling Stones things that we have laying around and put them on the shelves and in the storage units. Our area of the office looks much cleaner now that all of the extra stuff is out of the way. I did some artist news for a few hours and realized that I'm actually going to miss doing artist news. I like being able to research our artists and use my creativity to write different stories about them. I did a few tasks for Renata here and there like running documents to different floors and opening mail and organizing emails. It was just another stereotypical day.

Tuesday, December 20th

Today, we had another intern listening session. This one was for King Charles who is an artist from the UK who hasn't really had his big break out yet. They're trying to figure out what songs to put on his EP album that will be released in the US next year, and they're also trying to figure out what song they want to launch as his new single. To figure out which songs to pick for what, they have all of the interns go in to the lounge and listen to his entire album and then write down comments and a score out of 10 for each song. This album had about 15 songs on it and we had to listen to it twice, so it took a long time to complete. But it was fun to hear unreleased music and I was actually a huge fan of his music. I would definitely buy the album when it comes out. After we got out of the intern session, we came back and finished all of the normal tasks and put away a whole bunch of new CDs that we got delivered to us.

Monday, December 19th

Today, Monte got another scoring sheet for a song writing competition that he is a judge for. It's through the same radio station that we worked with a few weeks ago, Z100, when we had to judge the songs for their contest. Now, they're hosting a song writing competition that Monte is a judge in, but before Monte listens to the songs and judges them, he likes to get an outside opinion. So the interns had to listen to all of the songs and give them a score of 1 through 10. There were about 20 songs to listen to, and because we were listening to the lyrics this time, we couldn't skip through some of the songs. We had to listen to all of them all the way through and that took quite a bit of time. I love listening to new music though, so I didn't mind putting in my headphones and focusing on the music for a little bit. After we were done, and after we had taken a lunch break, we did some artist news and I had to help send out some more mailings to more radio stations. There weren't 300 this time, more like 200, so it still took some time, but not nearly as long.

Thursday 15th - Friday 16th

These past few days I've been pulling together final renderings for the show and creating boards for everything. I presented my ideas to the class on Friday, showing the class how to pull together a final sketch. When their class presented their ideas to me, I took note of a lot of the things that the group collectively had in their sketches. On Friday I also did an activity with the kids taking them in small groups up to the costume room to pick one piece that the justified their sketch of the characters they chose to present on. The kids were good in their justifications for their pulls which helped me understand their thought process. Although it may not have saved me time in the pulling process different eyes see different things in costumes, so it was great to get different opinions and to provide the learning opportunity. When surveying the pulls that the kids did I noticed that the costumes were workable, but there would definitely need to be revisions to each of the pieces. Overall, the class has been interesting and hopefully will continue to grow in their costuming abilities.

Outside of the class, I attended a rehearsal and did quick measurements of all the characters before they went through their lines. One of the main things about costuming that is so interesting for me is seeing how the characters interact with each other and how they individually portray their character. While the director and design team may have one idea of a costume, it is a great experience to see how the character develops with the actor as well. I'm excited to see how the design develops through the whole of the show.

Thursday, December 15th

Renata is giving us the day off tomorrow as an early Christmas present so there won't be a post tomorrow. I only have a few days left here at my internship, but I feel like I've been here a lot longer than 5 months. Today, Renata and I talked about me coming back to intern again next semester. She's been interviewing a lot of people for the position, but we're going to try to work something out so I can come back and help the new interns get adjusted and then finish out next semester working for her too. I would love to come back because I've met a lot of neat people and learned a lot of fun things. Renata and I talked about next semester for a long time while Monte was in a meeting for a few hours, but once he came out it was back to work. I spent the day helping another intern, Brandon, send out some mailings. We had about 300 CDs to mail out to various radio stations and it takes forever to package each individual CD and put on each label one by one. I had to stop a few times to watch Renata's lines and do a few things here and there, but I spent a majority of the day sending out CDs.

First (Official) Day!

So for my internship over winter break I will be working at the high school I graduated from as a guest designer for their showing of Dancing of Lughnasa! While the job isn't as glamorous as I would want it to be, it's still a great opportunity. My theatre director and I had a meeting earlier this week about his image for the show. His ideas and my preliminary ideas were very similar, so I was happy to hear his ideas. Another part of my internship involves going in to the school's technical theatre class to help them understand how to costume a show. One thing I really wanted to demonstrate to the class was the fact that costuming does not just involve sketching and then making clothes. Costumers must pull from costume shops because making everything can become expensive and time-consuming. Today in class the kids all presented their renderings of two of the characters from the show. It was very interesting to see everyone's different takes on the looks. The class is interesting to work with because just one year ago I was in that class. I've been working on renderings today which I will present in class tomorrow as well as to my director sometime this week. So far my renderings are a mix of knowledge from the movie version of the show, my research on the era and my own style mixed in.

Wednesday, December 14th

Today, we had to do a lot of preparing for the holiday party that's coming up next week. Renata sent out the invitations and the emails last week, and she created a specific email just for the holiday party that people can RSVP to so that we can have all of the info in one place. So today, my job was to create an Excel sheet to keep track of who is coming to the holiday party and whether or not they're bringing a plus one. Because we haven't checked the holiday email since last week, we had a lot of RSVPS to go through. I made a neat spreadsheet and went through email after email to enter the names of the people attending and the names of their plus one. It took a while because there are so many people at our company, but it's something that we can check on every few days because people will RSVP every few days. After I got done with the holiday list, I spent the rest of the day doing the normal things like archiving Monte's emails and completing all of the artist news stories. There wasn't a lot going on today in artist news, so it took me a while and some searching to find some good stories to post.

Tuesday, December 13th

Today I did a lot of running around outside of the office. I had to stop by Lee's Art Shop down the street to buy a new frame Monte needed for a picture of him and Nicki Minaj. Lee's is a huge store with twice as much stuff as there should be in there, so it took me a while to find just the right frame. I also had to grab a birthday card for Slim from Lee's as well. Slim is one of the creators of Cash Money and is extremely important in the music industry. It was his birthday earlier in the week and we bought him a Louis Vuitton iPad 2 case for his iPad2 and before we sent it to him, we had to attach a card. I grabbed a nice classy one that matched the wrapping paper that we used. After that, I had to run by Morton's Grocery Store to buy some apples and grapes and peanut butter for Monte. He's gotten into the habit of having an apple before he leaves the office, so we like to keep a stash of them. After Morton's I ran over to Duane Reid to buy a few magazines that our artists are featured in. I brought them all back to the office and Mara and I went through all of the bags and completed everything that needed to be done. It was fun to run around town a little and enjoy the city during a work day.

Monday, December 12th

There has been a lot of construction in our building over the past few weeks because they're trying to move some offices around. Right now our publicity department is half on our 8th floor and half on the 6th floor. It's really inconvenient for everyone so they're switching some people around to keep everyone together. They're also changing the 3rd floor, the 5th floor, and the 7th floor. So almost every floor except for the lobby is being torn apart. This makes it extremely difficult to deliver documents to certain people because a lot of them have changed floors. Today, I spent roughly a half an hour trying to hunt down Monte's business partner Doug Koch who used to be on 6. Renata told me he was now on the 3rd floor, but after a half an hour of searching, I found out he was on the 5th floor. Once I got back, I continued doing the normal tasks until Renata offered to take us on a tour of the new floors so we could get to know where everyone was. It was good to figure out where everyone was so that I don't have a repeat of today all over again.

Friday, December 9th

Today, Monte had back to back meetings so it was hard to get in to his office to get any of his work done. So we did a lot of tasks for Renata like placing more drink and office supply orders. We ordered more CDs that we're out of…even though we don't have any room for them ever since we got tens and tens of Rolling Stones CDs in. I ran over to staples to buy a few things for the office that we couldn't wait for. I got some binders and dividers and some USB keys. It didn't take me very long, and since I was out Renata said that I could take a longer lunch. So Mara and I took our time around the city a little and stopped at Lenny's Cafe across the street and ate and talked about what we were going to do next semester. Mara is staying at Republic, but is working over on the publicity side of things. So she won't be working for Monte anymore. I've been thinking about talking to Renata about staying on for another semester to learn some more things and really get in to the industry a little more. Once we got back to the office, we finished up all of the artist news and did some expenses with Renata. After that, we did little tasks here and there to wrap up the day.

Thursday, December 8th

Today we started off by doing all of the normal things, and we had to do them on time and fast because Monte was back in the office. I archived his emails and went through Renata's emails to update contacts and schedule appointments. After that, I had to help post some notecards on Monte's board of upcoming projects, but that only took me about a half an hour. After lunch, we got a huge shipment of the new Amy Winehouse CD in, and we had to do a lot of promotional work with the album today since it came out this week. We wrote some specific artist news stories about Amy and the album, and then we sent copies of the CD out to important business partners of Monte. We had to personally deliver 10 copies of the CD to a woman who lives on the upper west side. So I got to get out of the office for a bit and drive with Danny (Monte's driver) to the apartment and hand deliver the CDs. It was nice to get out of the office, but once I got back it was the normal work of art its news and mailings.

Wednesday, December 7th

Today, Monte was still gone, so we got to take it easy. I mean easy as in we hardly did any work all day. We went through and did the usual morning routine like we always do. We archived Monte's emails and went through and added contacts to the call sheet and scheduled some meetings for Monte. We opened up all of his mail and put it in a UPS box to send to his house, and then we did the artist news stories. It usually takes us a while to find the stories and write them up and post them on the website with pictures and links, but today we have everything done by noon. Renata, Mara and I sat around and worked out what the rest of the year will look like schedule wise, and it didn't really look any different than what we're doing now. We did it to waste some time because we completed all of our work so early. For the rest of the day I did some Christmas shopping online and then we did some crossword puzzles. Renata let us go early and emailed us a few tasks to do once we got home. All in all, it was a very easy day.

Tuesday, December 6th

Today Monte left to go out of town for just two days. He's going to Nashville for a day to work on some Hunger Games stuff and then going to Baltimore tomorrow to work on some Cash Money projects. When Monte is gone, we take it pretty easy, but today we had a lot of little tasks to do. We went through all of the expenses and finished them and mailed them out to Monte's accountant. It was about 3 weeks worth of expenses that Monte had in his office that he forgot to give us, so that took us a while to work on. Then after we were done with those, we got a huge shipment of Rolling Stones CDs, DVDs, and box sets. We spent the next hour trying to find places to stash all of these things. We each got to take home a box set though, and they're worth about 150 dollars a piece and make the perfect present for a father or uncle. So it was like I was working and Christmas shopping at the same time. After that, we did some cleaning and organizing with the new shelves that were shipped in. The office looked nice by the end of the day, and we got to leave early. It was a pretty early Tuesday.

Monday, December 5th

Today Mara and I got to go outside of the office to work. The team for Amy Winehouse is releasing a new album of some of her songs that she recorded but never released. And before new albums are released, we have listening sessions. Usually the only listening sessions I do are small ones for small bands in an office down the hall. But this listening session had a lot of important people from the business who all dressed up to come listen to and remember Amy. Mara and I got to go down the street a ways and check people in at the door. We did what you would normally do when you hear of people checking others in at the door. It was pretty simple and didn't take very long. But after we were done working, we got to go in and join the listening session. It was a really cool experience to be able to hear some of Amy's music before the general public did. It was nice to get out of the office for a bit and to be able to listen to good music while we were at it. I wish that we got more out of office tasks to do.

Friday, December 2nd

Today we had Kid Cudi come in to the office. We had to put up a Kid Cudi board and change the sign outside the lounge to his name. Preparing for an artist to come in is just a routine for the interns now, so it doesn't take us long at all to get around to the key points in the office and change what needs to be changed. It was really exciting because I'm a huge fan of his and I got to meet him and shake his hand and say hi and all of that good stuff. He was here for a meeting with Monte, which he was in for quite a while. They were in Monte's office for about two hours and then they moved to the lounge. The lounge is where they listen to artist's new songs or songs that they bring in that belong to other artists. They were listening to a few new tracks from Kid Cudi's unreleased album. It's always kind of cool to be able to listen to the new music before it's released to anyone else. They were in the lounge for about an hour and the Kid Cudi left and the office went back to doing the normal work. For the rest of the day, we wrote some artist news stories about Kid Cudi and put up some pictures of him in our office. The artists always take the time to snap a few promotional shots with Monte and Avery.

Thursday, December 1st

Today we did a lot of work with The Hunger Games. The movie doesn't come out until March, but our label is heavily involved in the film because we're supplying some music for it. We worked in Monte's office listening to sample songs matched with sample scenes and helped him rearrange the note card board that has all of the artists that will be featured in the film. Whenever we work with Monte, it's always a fun project. I was super excited to be able to do work like that today because I just finished reading the Hunger Games books and I'm obsessed with them. So any work I get to do in the office that's related to it, I love. We had to take down some notes of what we liked and didn't like and what we thought fit and didn't fit. It was neat to play even a very very small role in a film that will be huge. After we were done helping Monte, we got to do some more research for the film like watching the official trailer over and over and taking notes on it, and reading up on peoples' reactions and responses on Facebook and Twitter. All in all, it was a fun day.