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.