Category Archives: Broadcasting/Television

Ellis (Yahui) Liang ’15, New York Public Radio

Posted on by

For a pub­lic radio lover, hav­ing a Princetern­ship at New York Pub­lic Radio (NYPR) was like vis­it­ing heaven. NYPR is the pub­lic radio sta­tion that serves the metro New York area and con­sists of WNYC AM and FM (pub­lic radio news sta­tions), WQXR (a clas­si­cal music sta­tion), and WNJN (a set of NJ pub­lic radio sta­tions that were recently bought by NYPR).

Ivan Zim­mer­man ‘80, Gen­eral Coun­sel for WNYC, started the day off by giv­ing me a tour of all three floors of the station’s head­quar­ters, from the cubi­cles to the radio archives. Know­ing that I was inter­ested in jour­nal­ism, Ivan brought me into one of the record­ing stu­dios, where I heard a famil­iar voice read­ing the news. It was Sote­rios John­son record­ing “Morn­ing Edi­tion”! It was so sur­real hear­ing a voice I have lis­tened to nearly every morn­ing embod­ied in a real per­son. Later, I even got to see Brian Lehrer host his show and watch as the pro­duc­ers per­formed all the behind– the-scenes magic, like screen­ing callers.

Ivan also brought me to a news depart­ment meet­ing, where dif­fer­ent edi­tors, pro­duc­ers, and radio jour­nal­ists updated each other on the sto­ries that they were work­ing on and brain­stormed ideas for the upcom­ing weekend.

The major­ity of the day, how­ever, was focused on the legal issues that NYPR faces. As Ivan is one of only two coun­sels for NYPR, he has to han­dle a diverse range of legal matters.

Ivan Zim­mer­man and Ellis

More than 50% of his work is deal­ing with con­tracts, Ivan told me. For exam­ple, in the after­noon, he had to read over a con­tract that dealt with main­te­nance work at the NYPR head­quar­ters. Janna Freed, the other coun­sel, had to rewrite part of a con­tract that dealt with prop­erty rights of an artist who was going to per­form on WNYC.

Another part of his job is related to under­writ­ing. Under­writ­ing, in the con­text of pub­lic radio, is the spon­sor­ship of the radio sta­tion, and in exchange the sta­tion will men­tion that busi­ness or orga­ni­za­tion on the air in its pro­gram­ming. The tricky thing about under­writ­ing is to make sure acknowl­edge­ments don’t veer on adver­tis­ing, which can threaten not only NYPR’s tax-exempt sta­tus but can cause the Fed­eral Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion (FCC) to revoke the station’s licenses. Ivan’s respon­si­bil­ity is to make sure NYPR’s under­writ­ers don’t unin­ten­tion­ally make “WNYC is spon­sored by X com­pany” sound like “WNYC thinks you should buy X company’s products.”

Finally Ivan’s daily work included many other responsibilities. For instance, Ivan advised one jour­nal­ist about the ethics and legal­i­ties of inter­view­ing patients at a hos­pi­tal. Ear­lier in the day, he had to resolve a dis­pute with another com­pany that was going to pro­duce a music show using a name that NYPR had already trademarked.

For some­one who squirms at the thought of pub­lic speak­ing and would be a hor­ri­ble trial lawyer, I was delighted to learn that as a gen­eral coun­sel, one could delve into the intri­ca­cies of law with­out deal­ing with all the argu­ing and stress of lit­i­ga­tion. (In fact, when NYPR goes to court, they hire an out­side firm to rep­re­sent them.) The work is also very flexible—Ivan said he comes to work any­time from 9 am-10 am most days and leaves from 5 pm-9 pm. But what I like best, and what has made being a gen­eral coun­sel at NYPR one of my dream jobs, is the envi­ron­ment. The funky fur­ni­ture and col­or­ful, open office space reflect the cre­ative work pro­duced in the NYPR head­quar­ters. And unlike a large law firm, at NYPR one can walk up two flights of stairs and sud­denly be immersed in the fast-paced, excit­ing envi­ron­ment of the “Morn­ing Edi­tion” pro­duc­tion stu­dio or lis­ten to an inspir­ing per­for­mance by a Chi­nese opera singer in the “Sound­check” studio.

If you like win­ning high-profile cases and work­ing at a pres­ti­gious firm, per­haps being a coun­sel for a media out­let isn’t for you. But if you like solv­ing com­pli­cated prob­lems and giv­ing advice to oth­ers in a cre­ative envi­ron­ment, being a coun­sel may be your dream job, too.

P.S. Another thing that made this Princetern­ship so fun was Ivan. He is really chill, super nice, and dis­pels all lawyer stereotypes!

 

Kenny Anhalt ’14, ESPN

Posted on by

Through the Princetern­ship pro­gram I had the priv­i­lege of shad­ow­ing Bryce Gama, a direc­tor of Busi­ness Strat­egy at The Walt Dis­ney Company’s ESPN. From the out­set Bryce was extremely warm and infor­ma­tive. He wel­comed me to join him in sev­eral meet­ings, pro­vid­ing back­ground infor­ma­tion as needed and care­fully explain­ing answers to each of my ques­tions. Through­out the day I was intro­duced to many of Bryce’s cowork­ers, who gen­er­ously dis­cussed why they find their jobs ful­fill­ing. My learn­ing dur­ing the expe­ri­ence was qual­i­ta­tively unique in that I gained infor­ma­tion that can­not sim­ply be found on a web­site. By spend­ing time in Bryce’s office envi­ron­ment I wit­nessed the idio­syn­cratic atmos­phere of The Walt Dis­ney Com­pany. Thus, by expos­ing stu­dents to open pro­fes­sion­als in their every­day work­space, the Princetern­ship pro­gram pro­vides a phe­nom­e­nal oppor­tu­nity for Prince­ton under­grad­u­ates to learn about a career they hope to pursue.

Elise Dubuque ’13, ESPN

Posted on by

As soon as I had handed in my last final exam, I made my way into New York City for a very dif­fer­ent kind of expe­ri­ence. For my Princetern­ship, I shad­owed Bryce Gama, an eco­nom­ics major and mem­ber of the class of 2001 who is now a Senior Direc­tor of Busi­ness Strat­egy at ESPN. As soon as I passed through the large dou­ble doors of the ABC build­ing I was con­fronted on every turn of the hall­way with a logo—either of a net­work, TV show, or other media prod­uct that I was famil­iar with. It was this famil­iar­ity with the prod­uct that was espe­cially excit­ing for me as I pre­pared myself for the day’s meetings.

Meetings—this is prob­a­bly the word I would use that most aptly describes Bryce’s work as I fol­lowed him. It is through these numer­ous meet­ings that Bryce, as part of a team, nego­ti­ates agree­ments and advises the sales force on deci­sions regard­ing dig­i­tal assets, cable, and satel­lite space. While there is less of a direct focus on ath­let­ics that one would assume comes with a job at ESPN, the job was still very excit­ing in that the deci­sions his team makes have an impor­tant effect on media con­sumers, a group in which I con­sider myself an avid member.

In the first meet­ing I attended, Bryce and his team were dis­cussing the sta­tus of a new prod­uct. While the specifics of the meet­ing must remain con­fi­den­tial, Bryce and his col­leagues in Affil­i­ate Sales and Mar­ket­ing did not hes­i­tate to involve me in all parts of the dis­cus­sion. The next meet­ing, which focused on infor­ma­tion that was con­sid­er­ably less sen­si­tive, con­sisted of Bryce and fel­low team mem­bers ana­lyz­ing how changes to the exten­sion of the company’s deal with Com­cast trig­gered changes to other accounts. What I noticed in the meet­ing was how every­one in the office had a clear pas­sion for their work that made for an office cul­ture that was friendly, invit­ing, and over­all highly enjoyable.

Bryce Gama and Elise

Next, I accom­pa­nied Bryce and two other col­leagues to lunch. We com­pared our expe­ri­ences at Prince­ton as I picked his brain about his path to his cur­rent work. Both he and his col­leagues shared invalu­able advice about pur­su­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties in sales and mar­ket­ing and in par­tic­u­lar stressed the impor­tance of main­tain­ing a pas­sion for what you do. I came to see how this pas­sion trans­lates directly into a pos­i­tive work envi­ron­ment. What struck me as espe­cially refresh­ing in this par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence was that Bryce and his col­leagues merged hard work with laugh­ter, and although their team was rel­a­tively young in years, they took on respon­si­bil­i­ties and made extremely impor­tant strate­gic deci­sions involv­ing ESPN’s media assets. Again, I can­not speak directly about much of the pro­posed strat­egy I wit­nessed within the office, but I can stress that I was able to learn a lot about the specifics involved in mak­ing net­work bids and solid­i­fy­ing net­work deals.

Over­all, the Princetern­ship was a highly enjoy­able expe­ri­ence. It pro­vided an invalu­able glimpse into a line of work involv­ing mar­ket­ing strat­egy and media assets that I would have had no access to oth­er­wise. I espe­cially wel­comed the numer­ous con­ver­sa­tions I had with dif­fer­ent col­leagues within the office about how to uti­lize my lib­eral arts degree and dif­fer­ent ways in which I might explore my own poten­tial career path. Now, each and every time I turn on Sports­Cen­ter or check the ESPN app on my phone I’ll think back to my Princetern­ship expe­ri­ence and con­sider the busi­ness strat­egy involved in mak­ing it pos­si­ble for me to access infor­ma­tion on my beloved Boston sports teams from anywhere.

 

Cosette Gonzales ’15, ABC News

Posted on by

While attend­ing the Princetern­ship Ori­en­ta­tion, I remem­ber our career ser­vices rep­re­sen­ta­tive told us stu­dents, “Remem­ber to be flex­i­ble dur­ing the Princetern­ship expe­ri­ence. Some Princetern­ships may be more chaotic or hec­tic than others.”

Indeed, later my alum­nus would describe his job as “chaos, but a good chaos, a func­tional chaos.” Thus, I def­i­nitely did not know what to expect from this Princetern­ship expe­ri­ence, but I was excited to begin. I com­muted via sub­way from where I was stay­ing in New York City to ABC News’ office, which is near Lin­coln Cen­ter and west of Cen­tral Park. The alum­nus I would shadow, John Grif­fin ‘99, is the Spe­cial Projects and Mobile Edi­tor at ABC News. I learned quickly that my days did not have a set rou­tine, but instead var­ied greatly depend­ing on issues in the news­room. Usu­ally we would fig­ure out our agenda for the day by check­ing his very busy email inbox. Many turn to him when they have some­thing that needs trou­bleshoot­ing, earn­ing him the nick­name GRIFF: “Gripes Resolved in Fast Fashion.”

After greet­ing each other, he toured me around ABC News, and I saw rooms full of mon­i­tors, teleprompters, video feeds, green screens, cam­eras, and lights. The news­room where he worked was full of com­put­ers and mon­i­tors. The sounds of ring­ing phones, jour­nal­ists call­ing sources to inter­view them for their lat­est piece, key­boards click­ing away, and iPad alerts all rever­ber­ated through the air.

On his com­puter at his desk space, Mr. Grif­fin showed me Chart­beat and News­beat, which show real-time ABCNews.com web sta­tis­tics about where traf­fic is com­ing from. He told me about the impor­tance of SEO or Search Engine Opti­miza­tion, and how you want to keep the “bounce rate” low, improve link­age by using Face­book or Twit­ter, and pack­age the story to fit search key­words. He also taught me about spon­sor­ships, how dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies or orga­ni­za­tions pur­chase ads and how ABC News has to meet a cer­tain impres­sion goal and keep track of pac­ing. Addi­tion­ally, you do not want to asso­ciate some spon­sors with cer­tain arti­cles. For exam­ple, if some­one is read­ing an arti­cle about Occupy Wall Street, you would not want to have a ban­ner of Gold­man Sachs on that same webpage.

Later, on TVs around the news­room, I noticed the ABC News chan­nel had the head­line: AIRCRAFT HIT BY EXPLOSIONS and felt alarmed. That is, until I noticed the words “DRILL…DRILL…” scrolling hor­i­zon­tally across the screen. I learned that broad­cast com­pa­nies often hold news drills, which are used to test oper­a­tional readi­ness and com­mu­ni­ca­tion in case one day there is an actual unex­pected emer­gency that needs broad cov­er­age. Anchors in the news­room and on site impro­vised and reported as though this explo­sion was a real event, and the TVs showed “footage” of the event. News net­works have to be care­ful, how­ever, to not make peo­ple think this is real news and cause panic by show­ing this cov­er­age on live TV.

My alum­nus then gave me jour­nal­ism tips. He empha­sized how for break­ing news, it was impor­tant to try to get your arti­cle out there first, although accu­racy must not be sac­ri­ficed. He showed me some humor­ous web writ­ing head­lines. About Osama Bin Laden’s Death: “Has Bin”; about Steve Jobs being forced to issue free cases for a poorly-functioning iPhone 4: “Let Them Eat Case”; about the U.S. Army unwit­tingly sup­ply­ing trucks to both sides of the Afghan war: “Oh, Truck,” and oth­ers: “Slip­ping on Greece,” “Obama Culpa,” “To Rus­sia, With Flub.” He taught me about “the art of the tease,” how it’s not always best to tell your audi­ence when you can tease them. Pose a ques­tion, involve the audi­ence, try to make it about the viewer, and raise the stakes, such as: “Is even more of your income now at risk?” For broad­cast writ­ing, use active words, called “the fly­ing –ing.” “How­ever,” he said, “don’t sac­ri­fice facts for cleverness.”

My work­day ended early that day, but I was told I could return at 6:30 pm for some optional work. I decided to go back since I would be able to do more hands-on work. I entered the Dig­i­tal Media Room, which was full of mon­i­tors, as well as sound and edit­ing equip­ment. Mr. Grif­fin showed me the four-minute long news briefs ABC News would make for mtvU, includ­ing episodes of “Don’t Know Much About His­tory” series with best-selling author Ken­neth C. Davis. My alum­nus showed me the basics of how to use Avid News­Cut­ter Soft­ware. “You just have to learn how to get used to it over time, and with prac­tice, you can play it like a piano,” he said, rack­ing between dif­fer­ent keys on the key­board with ease. He taught me about audio and video lay­ers for the sequences and splic­ing. I helped him do a lit­tle bit of edit­ing for one of the clips by end­ing cuts before large audio gaps in order to keep the dialogue’s fast pace.

The next morn­ing I printed out Pow­er­Point slides in prepa­ra­tion for ConEd (or Con­tent Edi­tor) train­ing, which I also attended. ConEd is used to gen­er­ate arti­cles and manip­u­late the home­page. After that, I got to do some hands-on work using Word­Press, which ABC News gen­er­ates their blogs from, and spent the next few hours edit­ing author credit on articles.

ABC News­room!

Before lunch, we explored the stu­dio labyrinths within ABC News and got to see old sets that were ripped apart to be used for later pro­duc­tions in the spring or sum­mer. I saw where they used to shoot “The Tony Danza Show,” as well as the cur­rent set they use for the food show “The Chew,” and the now empty set for “Who Wants to be a Mil­lion­aire.” We wan­dered through old con­trol rooms and pre­vi­ously used make-up and dress­ing rooms.
 

As we came back to his office space, I saw a woman walk by who looked vaguely famil­iar. “Was that…Barbara Wal­ters?” I man­aged to say. “Yup,” my alum­nus responded with­out even look­ing and returned to his email. Later, Diane Sawyer would film here to have this news­room as a backdrop.

Michelle, a pub­li­cist at ABC News, came by (she later was kind enough to give me a cap with ABC News printed on it). Mr. Grif­fin helped her fix the HTML cod­ing of web­pages dis­play­ing ABC News’ Emmy Nom­i­na­tions for 2011, which were cre­ated so that judges would be able to see the mate­r­ial clearly. For exam­ple, one of the entries was an inter­ac­tive vir­tual West­min­ster Abbey cre­ated around the time of the royal wed­ding.
 Mr. Grif­fin and I ended our last day with lunch at Shake Shack (where I had a deli­cious “pur­ple cow” grape soda float). He empha­sized, “don’t ask what you can learn how to do your­self,” and how it is use­ful to have knowl­edge about how to do a wide vari­ety of things, not just have one skill. For instance, even though he does not know all the intri­ca­cies of the HTML lan­guage, he taught him­self the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions of HTML. He also told me about how it is impor­tant to find a job that ful­fills you in not only a moral sense, but also in an eso­teric, soul­ful sense.

This Princetern­ship was a great oppor­tu­nity since it pro­vided me with valu­able and inter­est­ing insight into the field of broad­cast jour­nal­ism and edi­to­r­ial and I would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend it to oth­ers. Mr. Grif­fin was very friendly, help­ful, and infor­ma­tive. Although I am con­sid­er­ing apply­ing my pas­sion for writ­ing more to cre­ative writ­ing, video games, or film, the ABC News Princetern­ship taught me valu­able lessons about writ­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, soft­ware pro­grams, and the role of enter­tain­ment and news media in today’s world.

Amanda Bestor-Siegel ’12, ABC Television

Posted on by

On Mon­day I went to the stu­dio where “Pri­vate Prac­tice” shoots – Raleigh Stu­dios, in West Hol­ly­wood.  As soon as I arrived I met Gre­gory Van Horn ‘87, the won­der­ful pro­duc­tion designer who I was shad­ow­ing for the week.  He brought me upstairs to the fourth floor of the office build­ing, which is where all of the “Pri­vate Prac­tice” pro­duc­tion offices are.  Raleigh is also the home of two other TV shows, “Cas­tle” and “The Closer,” so the three shows all have office spaces and a num­ber of sound­stages for shoot­ing on the lot.

Gre­gory first brought me around all of the dif­fer­ent offices so I could meet the many dif­fer­ent peo­ple who work behind the scenes on the show in the pro­duc­tion, props, set dec­o­ra­tion, account­ing, and sev­eral other depart­ments.  I also met every­one in the art depart­ment, which was to be my home for the week – Kevin, the show’s art direc­tor, Cate, the set designer, and Ditte, the art coor­di­na­tor.  All of them were so wel­com­ing and help­ful through­out the week – they really went above and beyond in show­ing me around and answer­ing the many ques­tions I had about art depart­ment work and the TV indus­try in general.

I spent Mon­day get­ting to know the many dif­fer­ent places at Raleigh.  Gre­gory and Kevin first brought me down to Stage 1, one of the many sound­stages that Pri­vate Prac­tice has.  There I was able to walk around the set for the prac­tice, and get a close up look at all of the incred­i­ble work the art and set dec­o­ra­tion depart­ments have done.  Gre­gory and Kevin explained to me how the back­drops work (essen­tially, these are very large blow-ups of pho­tographs of L.A. that get placed behind win­dows on the set, and which can be altered with light­ing to por­tray either day­time or night­time).  They also showed me some of the work they’ve done for this sea­son in par­tic­u­lar – for exam­ple, the sur­face of the recep­tion desk in the prac­tice was changed this sea­son to one with a more shell-like design on it – and the dif­fer­ent walls and glass win­dows in the prac­tice that can be moved to cre­ate addi­tional room and vis­i­bil­ity for the cam­era.  Finally, we went to one of the most excit­ing places on set – craft ser­vices!  This is the very long table on set that has all of the food you can ever imag­ine, which the cast, crew, and pro­duc­tion staff can snack on through­out the day.  Through­out this brief tour, I asked Gre­gory and Kevin a lot of ques­tions about the dif­fer­ent art-related jobs (pro­duc­tion designer, art direc­tor, set designer, set dec­o­ra­tor, etc.) so I could get a sense of how they dif­fer and what areas I might be most inter­ested in.

After the brief tour of Stage 1, we went back up to the art depart­ment office.  I looked around at many of the draw­ings and col­lages that have been pinned up around the office and in the hall­way.  For exam­ple, all of the main char­ac­ters have their own poster in the hall­way that shows draw­ings and pho­tographs of their houses, along with details like car­pet mate­ri­als and wall­pa­per color options.  I was also given the oppor­tu­nity at this point to read through all of the scripts for the rest of the sea­son (episode 5.17 had just aired, so there were four to catch up on after that).

Gre­gory had a friend vis­it­ing the set in the late morn­ing, so the group of us went back down to the lot at this point for a com­plete tour of all the dif­fer­ent stages.  It was amaz­ing get­ting to see all the sets in per­son and to see how com­plex all of them are, because there are def­i­nitely some details you miss when watch­ing TV.  “Pri­vate Prac­tice” has five sound­stages at Raleigh (in addi­tion to a stage at the Sunset-Gower Stu­dios, a short drive away).  Stage 1 holds the prac­tice, Stage 10 holds the hos­pi­tal, Stage 14 holds Addison’s and Sam’s (two of the main char­ac­ters) Mal­ibu houses, and Stages 7 and 9 con­tain a num­ber of dif­fer­ent character’s houses and smaller rooms.  In addi­tion to get­ting to walk through all the sets, I also learned a bit about eti­quette on TV/ film sets – for instance, always keep­ing your phone shut off, walk­ing very qui­etly (or just stand­ing still) when the cam­era is rolling, and not enter­ing or exit­ing the stage when shoot­ing is tak­ing place (there is a red siren light out­side the door of each stage to let you know when this is happening!).

After the grand tour of all the sets, it was time for lunch.  Mon­day was a double-up day, mean­ing the show was shoot­ing two dif­fer­ent episodes at the same time.  Dur­ing lunch we went to the pro­duc­tion meet­ing for the new episode that had just started film­ing (5.21), so I got to see how the AD’s and pro­duc­tion office sched­ule the shoot­ing days and com­mu­ni­cate with the many dif­fer­ent depart­ments in mak­ing sure that every­thing gets done for the episode on time.  After the pro­duc­tion meet­ing, I left Raleigh to go to ABC Stu­dios in Bur­bank and fill out gen­eral intern­ship paper­work for them.

On Tues­day morn­ing, Kevin brought me down to the set to watch a bit of shoot­ing on the hos­pi­tal set.  I got to meet Jim, the first AD on the show (who basi­cally runs the set dur­ing shoot­ing), as well as many other peo­ple who work on the set.  I was amazed by the num­ber of peo­ple who work on shoot­ing – from light­ing to sound to cam­era oper­a­tors, grips, hair and make-up crew, cos­tumes crew, etc.  There were many peo­ple scat­tered through­out the set, some work­ing right next to the shoot­ing and oth­ers (like the Direc­tor of Pho­tog­ra­phy and the writ­ers of the episode) watch­ing the shoot­ing on TV screens that show what the two dif­fer­ent cam­eras are shoot­ing at the moment.  Kevin and I stood with Chuck, the video play­back tech­ni­cian (whose job is awe­some – he makes the med­ical equip­ment mon­i­tors in the hos­pi­tal rooms show dif­fer­ent images and stats for patients as needed dur­ing the scene) and watched the shoot­ing of a scene in one of the patient rooms.

After watch­ing shoot­ing, I went back up to the art depart­ment office.  Gre­gory showed me all of the set draw­ings that Cate makes for the show, and he explained to me how they rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent types of walls and sets on the draw­ings (for exam­ple, walls that need to swing out to make addi­tional room for the cam­era are marked dif­fer­ently than walls that remain sta­tion­ary).  Gre­gory also showed me “Per­spec­tive,” a pro­duc­tion design mag­a­zine made up of dif­fer­ent arti­cles writ­ten by pro­duc­tion design­ers about their work.  I spent some time read­ing dif­fer­ent copies of the mag­a­zine, which was really fas­ci­nat­ing as far as learn­ing about how dif­fer­ent pro­duc­tion design­ers approach their work in both film and TV.  After lunch I went back to the set to watch some more shoot­ing, this time on the Mal­ibu set.  Watch­ing shoot­ing on the Mal­ibu decks is really inter­est­ing because it’s incred­i­ble how much of the work is done in post-production (the entire beach and ocean are cre­ated by a blue screen right in front of the con­structed deck).  I con­tin­ued to meet a bunch of the peo­ple who work on set and learned more about how they got involved in their respec­tive areas of work. 

Greg Van­Horn and Amanda

After watch­ing shoot­ing I went with Kevin and Gre­gory to Stage 7, where they were work­ing on a smaller per­sonal project.  We walked around the set for Violet’s and Pete’s (another cou­ple on the show) house and Kevin and Gre­gory talked to me more about the dif­fer­ent jobs in cre­at­ing the look of each set (for exam­ple, if a lot of green­ery is required on a set they might hire some­one specif­i­cally to place the green­ery).  Tues­day was a pretty light day for the art depart­ment, so at 5 pm when every­one went home I went back down to the set to watch more shoot­ing at “Malibu.”

On Wednes­day morn­ing I got to go on a bunch of set dec­o­ra­tion runs.  First I went with Jill, the buyer, to the props house at Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios and to Alpha, a props house devoted specif­i­cally to med­ical props.  The Uni props house was one of the most amaz­ing places I’ve ever been.  It was enor­mous, con­tain­ing dif­fer­ent floors for drapery/ fab­rics, fur­ni­ture, and every kind of fix­ture and small prop you could imag­ine.  I walked around with Jill and saw the process through which she marks any items that the set dec­o­ra­tor, Melissa, might want for the show.  Jill also showed me around the set lots behind the props house, which can be rented out to peo­ple who are film­ing, such as the west­ern town and the Euro­pean square sets.

After Uni we went to Alpha, where Jill was get­ting a few boxes full of dif­fer­ent pill bot­tles to fill a new med­ical cab­i­net on the hos­pi­tal set.  Spend­ing the morn­ing with Jill was really fun and also really infor­ma­tive, because she taught me a lot about the dif­fer­ences between the art, set dec­o­ra­tion, and props depart­ments and unions, and she was very help­ful and eager to clar­ify all the ques­tions I had about the dif­fer­ent jobs that exist.

Almost as soon as I got back to Raleigh, I went right back out again with Ditte to the sign shop at Uni.  Kevin has a lot of graphic design expe­ri­ence, so he designs the new signs and posters that are fre­quently needed on the show sets.  The sign shop at Uni then ren­ders them into signs, so Ditte and I went to pick up a num­ber of the fin­ished ren­ders.  I con­tin­ued to have some really great and infor­ma­tive con­ver­sa­tions with Ditte about the dif­fer­ent art-related jobs in the indus­try, and how Pri­vate Prac­tice com­pares to other shows (for one thing, its shoot­ing sched­ule is very efficient!).

In the after­noon I helped Kevin and Ditte tape up new signs out­side the patient doors on the hos­pi­tal set.  I learned that the art depart­ment isn’t allowed to actu­ally affix the signs onto the set, because that’s the painters’ job.  I hadn’t real­ized until this week how seg­mented the dif­fer­ent unions are and how specif­i­cally the jobs on the show are divided up between peo­ple, so it was really inter­est­ing for me to see how many dif­fer­ent peo­ple cre­ate the look of the sets at every stage.

At the end of the day I stayed late again to watch shoot­ing, this time in the prac­tice.  It was a very large scene with all of the main cast mem­bers, so shoot­ing took a longer period of time.  Once again, every­one on set was very kind and it was inter­est­ing to see all the ways the set can be changed between takes to accom­mo­date film­ing the same scene from dif­fer­ent angles.

Even though my Princetern­ship was only orig­i­nally going to last three days, Gre­gory was very gen­er­ous in allow­ing me to come in on Thurs­day and Fri­day as well to con­tinue observ­ing every­thing.  On Thurs­day he and Kevin brought me to Sunset-Gower to show me around the other sets they have – Charlotte/Cooper’s home, as well as an exten­sion of the prac­tice (it’s inter­est­ing how the same build­ing in TV-world is actu­ally split up on two dif­fer­ent sets in the real world).  They pointed out some of the parts of the set that we rarely see on TV, like the bath­room in Charlotte/Cooper’s home and the shelves in Pete’s office.  On Thurs­day after­noon, I went back to the art depart­ment office and read many of the old scripts of the show.  It’s fun to see how episodes I’ve already seen trans­lated from page to screen, and all of the scripts in the art depart­ment office have set lists and draw­ings in the back as well that taught me more about how set plans are visu­ally notated and orga­nized for each episode.

On Fri­day morn­ing, the art depart­ment received the list of new sets that needed to be cre­ated for the final episode.  Gre­gory, Kevin, and I went into down­town L.A. to the L.A. Cen­ter Stu­dio to look at some pos­si­ble sets to use.  Like the back­lots at Uni, L.A. Cen­ter Stu­dio has a num­ber of sets in the build­ing that can be rented out for dif­fer­ent shoot­ing needs, like a cour­t­house, a jail set, an office space, and much, much more.  After walk­ing around the sets here and choos­ing some to be used for the new episode, Gre­gory and Kevin took me on a brief archi­tec­tural tour of down­town L.A.  On Fri­day, we received the new script for the sea­son finale, so we spent the end of the day read­ing through it (it was a very excit­ing good­bye present for me!).

I can­not express how amaz­ing this week was and how grate­ful I am to Gre­gory, the art depart­ment, and every­one else I met at “Pri­vate Prac­tice.”  I came into the week with a very strong inter­est in art depart­ment work, but I needed to learn more about the dif­fer­ent jobs that are avail­able in the TV/ film indus­try and which I would be most inter­ested in.  Every­one I met was incred­i­bly accom­mo­dat­ing and open to answer­ing all of my ques­tions and teach­ing me about what they do on the show, and I came away with even more excite­ment about pos­si­bly going into art depart­ment or set dec­o­ra­tion work after grad­u­at­ing this year.  Thank you, “Pri­vate Practice!”