|
[Dec. 5th, 2005|04:51 pm] |
So I suppose it's about time for a major life update...
I decided, once and for all, to apply to grad school this year. I started with the big three - USC, UCLA, and NYU - as most people do, and I knocked them all out. NYU is too much money - almost the priciest in the country, but Columbia beats it just barely - and no one ever finishes the 3-year program there in under 4 years. UCLA had an average time-to-graduation (of their own admission - it's on their website) of 5 years for their 3-year program. And USC is waaayyy too competitive amongst the students, which doesn't foster good working relationships. I'm looking to meet people at school who might be colleagues for a lifetime, and that isn't likely to happen if we're trying to tear each other to shreds to get our own projects made.
So where am I applying? Chapman University. And now you're like, "Chapman? That's a college?" And I'm like, "Yep." It's in Orange County, about 50 minutes outside of LA (when traffic is good). It's in a much more environmentally pleasant area of California than LA is, and the college is wonderful. Their film program is stunningly good. They wooed the guy who designed AFI's film program from AFI, and in the years since he's convinced two chairs and two professors to come to Chapman from AFI, as well. Right now Chapman is completing construction on a brand new $31M film building which will have full post-production studios, sound stages, and a green screen room.
Their 3-year program is truly 3 years. Every student who attends gets funding for their film, so no one is left out in the cold. This also eliminates competition amongst the students. They've adopted a Conservatory model, which only a handle of schools across the country have done, but which seems to be the wave of the future for graduate film programs. Your first year is boot camp: classes in directing, producing, writing, cinematography, production design, editing, etc. At the end of the first year your specialization is decided upon and locked in. Your second year that's all you do. If you're a director, you only direct. For the projects you do, a writing student will write them, you'll direct them, another student will edit them, etc. Your third year is your thesis film year, and though you can do more than one job they recommend you stick to your specialization and let the other students do theirs on your project. And like I said, everyone gets money, so no one is left to go find outside funding to finish their project.
The first year all of the projects are shot in digital. The second and third years are 16mm, but they're looking into getting 35mm cameras now.
I met with the Chair of the department in October and he was fantastic. I asked him a slew of questions, which he seemed to appreciate, and I think I made a very favorable impression on him. The registration deadline for materials is February 1st, so I have some breathing room. I've got all of my people lined up to write letters of recommendation. I've written a personal statement which I may or may not revise further. I'm currently on my second draft, which was a marked improvement over the first. I also need to write an essay on my favorite film and why it's my favorite, as well as a personal experience that was particularly formative. Then there's a dramatic scene I have to write. They give you three scenarios to pick from. I also have to submit scholarly and creative portfolios of any pre-existing work. This could be anything - it needn't only be film-related. So I may even include my LJ as a creative achievement, seeing as how 6 1/2 years of writing about one's life is some kind of creative output. But I wanted something in there that would show them that I've done something film-related already, which brings me to the next item in my life update...
On November 1st I began writing my first screenplay. Well, not writing it, but researching it. I'm adapting the novel Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. She was a Jewish women who wrote primarily in the 20's, and her work is largely autobiographical. This story is probably the closest to her own life experience. It's the story of the youngest girl in a Jewish family, born to first-generation immigrants. The father is a righteous student of the Torah and uses his study as an excuse not to work. Thus, it falls to the women of the house to bring in the money and food. The father is very domineering, ruling the household with an iron fist, but doing nothing, really, to deserve it. Eventually the daughers are married off in succession to really lousy guys of the father's choosing. Sara, seeing the cycle of this misery, decides that she forge her own path, and leaves home. She gets a job in a laundry factory and goes to school at night. Eventually she gets into college, studies to be a school teacher, and wins an essay-writing contest on the experience of going to college. She returns to her neighborhood a fully-realized, independent woman. She has her own money, her own job, and eventually does meet a man of her own choosing. At the end, the mother has died, the father has remarried a gold-digging widower, and is destitute. The daughter takes pity on him, and she and her new boyfriend decide to take the father in so he is cared for in his old age. So, on the one hand it is a feminist novel about the rejection of patriarchal norms. On the other it is a traditional story of the American Dream - of one's ability to work hard, make smart decisions, and succeed on one's own terms. But it is also, in the end, about the endurance of family, and the bonds that tie us together, for better or worse. The change of heart at the end is unexpected, and, I think, possibly undeserved. But it is also heartfelt and very true to life.
The novel has a very direct narrative and will translate well into a screenplay, I think. I've been meeting with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bostonsteamer, who has acted as my technical consultant for, as I put it, "the Jewier sections of the book." We have also had great discussions about the nature of the characters, the book's themes, and, ultimately, what it's trying to say. It's been a great experience to share with someone. I've read it now, taking extensive notes, and also documenting each character who enters the picture. I now need to sit down, make a scene outline, and write it. It sounds like this will be more difficult than what I've done up to this point, but I don't think it will be. I'm going to stick very closely to the text, so the only real choice will be to cut certain scenes out, or try to make existing scenes more concise.
My goal is to have a draft done by the end of the year so that I can submit it to one of my recommendation letter-writers - a film professor I had at UW. He's going to use it as a reference to help shape his comments. So far, the experience has been amazingly rewarding. For the first time it feels like I'm not just talking about my dream, but actually doing something about it. This is creative output. It's tangible and could potentially have value. And, plus, it just feels good to work on something you care deeply about - shaping a story you feel should be told. As I've been re-reading the novel and taking notes my routine has been to sit at Starbucks, crank up the laptop for the note-taking, and listen to Aphex Twin's "I Care Because You Do" on my headphones (which is great music to read to, IMO). And so I've been working in one-hour blocks of time, because that's how long the album is. And every time I get to the end of that album, which finishes with Next Heap With- one of the most epic and original pieces of music I've ever heard - I have tears in my eyes. Maybe it's the music, or the experience of working on something I feel I'm destined to do, or both, but it's simply amazing. It's so intrinsically gratifying I can't hardly stand it. I feel I have arrived.
On the homefront, I'm moving to a new apartment. For those of you not up-to-speed: I was/am living with my friend Adam and his girlfriend Ariel. We've been there for eight months. Anyway, Ariel and I just never clicked as roommates. Attempts were made to talk about issues, let each other know of our various frustrations, and find compromises, but at the end of the day we're just very different people and people can only change so much. After much investigation of possible subletters that they might actually know it was decided to post on Craigslist for one. A woman responded almost immediately, we all met, they liked her, and that was that. I then had to find a new place, and searched high and low on Capitol Hill - my new neighborhood of choice - for one. I eventually found a very nice apartment at Summit and Roy on the north end of the hill and signed the lease on it.
It's a basement apartment, which a lot of people wouldn't go for, but it doesn't bother me much. I tried to think about how I actually spend my time at home - which isn't much nowadays - and realized that I really only do three things: sleep, watch movies, and play on the computer, none of which involve sunlight. So I think I'll be fine there. The other nice thing is that it's in the basement, and I don't have anyone on either side of me, which means I can crank up the subwoofer and finally watch my movies at the volume they deserve. I'll have to see just how much I can get away with, but, really, I'm in an ideal spot for it, so it'll be a lot better than the place I'm in now.
It will also be nice to be in a neighborhood which is particularly conducive to single 20-somethings, and active 20-somethings in general. Capitol Hill seems to be an area that a lot of people migrate to after graduation, and it has no shortage of hot, single people. I can't wait to do my own little pub crawl and find all the great watering holes there, as well as a battery of restaurants which stay open until all hours. I've gotten so much more socially active since college (backwards and ironic, I know) and I think I'm really going to thrive in this neighborhood.
Like a lot of people, I've always internally noted to myself that I should be doing something to help those less fortunate, but prior to now I hadn't done much. After my grandmother died (where we had Thanksgiving every year), my mom and I considered volunteering on Thanksgiving by serving food or something, since it just didn't seem right to keep doing Thanksgiving if we couldn't do it at grandma's house. My dad and sister were insistent that we keep up the tradition, though, so now we've begun having it at home. And, anyway, I really felt like I either needed to start getting involved or just admit that I'm one of those "oh, wouldn't it be nice" people who never actually does anything to help anybody out but pretends like they would if only they had the time. (I really hate those people because they think they're do-gooders and they're simply not.) So this year I got more involved in our office's various charity days.
One involved going to this place in Belltown called Baby Boutique which gives out clothing, strollers, toys, etc. to low-income mothers. They receive tons and tons of used clothes from private donors and new clothes from manufacturers, and it takes a lot of time to sort through it all and organize things on the racks. So, we spent a day going through endless bags of clothes, weeding out anything damaged or stained (because the owner wants the mothers to feel like they're getting good clothes - not hand-me-downs), and putting them on the racks.
Another event was our annual Gingerbread Design Competition, which is hosted by the Sheraton Hotel downtown here. The Seattle architecture firms compete by designing a gingerbread scene (I'd say "house" but it's more like a city block) that conforms to a particular theme of the Sheraton's choosing. This year's them was "A Dickens Holiday", which pretty much meant something related to "A Christmas Carol." The secret weapon on our team was a girl who worked for 4 years during college as a pastry chef. She had crazy-good decorating skills with frosting. All told we each probably put in 40 to 60 hours on the thing, and it came out really well. While the other firms went for balls-to-the-wall decorations, literally covering every square inch of available surface, we went for a more elegant, mannered approach that highlighted particular sections and left others more bare. It came out really well, and we were all very proud of it. For those of you in Seattle, these are all on display at the City Centre across the street from the Sheraton. Look for the Zimmer Gunsul Frasca one to see ours. I'll post pictures of this eventually, too. And at each display there are donation boxes that you can put money in. All of the money goes to benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Tomorrow I'm doing a "We Care" event for the Seattle Boys & Girls Club. The idea is that each participatign group comes up with a craft that kids can make . We supply the materials and the kids put the craft together at the event. They go from station to station with a big bag, putting the crafts together and adding them to their bag. At the end they should have 10 or 20 items. It's geared toward kids from lower-income families who probably won't get that many presents this Christmas, and who won't have any money to get their parents presents. These crafts give them the ability to give something to their parents, and to have things that they can keep for themselves. Christmastime has always been my favorite time of year, and it breaks my heart to think about any child not getting presents on Christmas, and of the heartache their parents probably feel to not be able to give them something. I think this event is absolutely wonderful and necessary, and it's going to be a lot of fun to help the kids put these crafts together and see the look of joy on their faces when those bags are filled up.
As I noted many weeks ago on here, my co-worker Matt left the company. This left me largely in charge of IT operations for the Seattle office. Based on my prior experience with servers I made a proposal to the partner in charge of the Seattle office that I fully ascend into the server role and that, if anyone, they hire a new Desktop guy. This offer was at first accepted, and then rejected. Their reason for rejecting it is somewhat muddy, mostly because so many people are involved in the decision-making process (partner in charge of Seattle, partner in charge of Technology who is in Portland, and other IT guys who are in Portland and Washington DC), but it has something to do with the fact that they want a server guy who also knows AutoCAD and various design apps. I think they're going to have an immensely hard time finding someone like this, though, because there may be hardcore Windows server administrators out there (and they're looking for someone who is a wiz with Active Directory), and there are people who know programs like AutoCAD, Revit, etc., but finding both of those qualifications in one candidate is going to be superbly rare. I think they're setting themselves up for disappointment.
Anyway, my job role has changed a bit, and may change more. They've said they want our office to resemble the DC more once they hire this new person: each IT guy doing some server stuff and some desktop stuff, rather than having a server guy and a desktop guy. But we'll see. In general I'm very frustrated with this place, and one of the things I liked best about working here - my co-worker Matt - is gone now. I feel like I've gotten what I'm going to out of this particular job experience and that at this point, while the paycheck may be good, I'm simply beating a dead horse. Not a great feeling at 24 years of age.
To this end I've put my feelers out there for other jobs. Notably, I applied for and interviewed today for my friend Morgan's job at a small business called the Rural Development Institute. If you don't know much about Morgan, he's my best friend, and I've known him for about 13 years now. We worked closely together in high school, administering that 1,300-user network, and we worked together again in college for 3 1/2 years, co-administering a small business called The Frank Doolittle Company. There is no one in this world who knows me personally and professionally as well as Morgan does. So you can imagine how amusing it was today when he had to interview me for this job. (Oh, I guess I should explain why he's leaving: he applied for and got accepted into a course of study in France that will begin in January.) The first part of the interview was with the hiring manager there, and then Morgan came in to administer the more techy portion of the interview. The lady knew that we knew each other - Morgan told her, and it was noted in my cover letter. So it was a light-hearted interview as Morgan asked me questions like "How much do you know about Windows XP and MS Office", and other totally obvious questions. It informed her of my tech knowledge, though, and that was the main thing. At the end, Morgan whispered to me that I'd done much better than any of the other candidates, which was very reassuring.
So, we'll see if I get that job. If I did I'd be taking a slight drop in pay. ZGF does profit-sharing at the end of the year, so while my wage might be the same there as it is here, I'd lose that money. My benefits would improve, though, as I would once again have dental insurance - something I've been sorely lacking since I got hired on here. It would also be much more enjoyable work, and I would be the de facto IT guy there, rather than one cog in the IT wheel here at ZGF. Oh, and I'd probably have a manager - something ZGF has decided the IT group simply doesn't need. Smart, huh? I think my "quality of living" as it relates to job satisfaction would go up immensely at that company, which would offset, for me, the decrease in pay, so I'm hopeful that they want me. Either way, though, I'm going to stick around at least until my review which will occur after the beginning of the year and see just how much they want to change my job role at ZGF, and if they intend to pay me any extra in the process.
Sike! No change here. My punk ass is still single. ;-) |
|
|
