Week Two

This week was my first full week at Trevanna Post. All of the women who work in the office made a really conscious effort to help teach me the swing of things and grasp an understanding of what it is that post production accountants do on a daily basis. I have to say, from what I've gathered, it's a pretty high-stress job. There's always a budget that's been breached, an unhappy director, and on the other side, a producer that has to balance the directors wish list with the monetary realities of the project. For the first few days jessi and I spent a lot of time reading each and every detail of the SAG cast list for men in black iii. We began to realize a pattern in the mistakes the production accountant had made and we worked hard to find a systematic approach to pointing out these errors and fixing them. Sometimes the accountant counted fitting days as work days and didn't county travel days. Sometimes he counted start trAvel but not end travel or visa versa. After we began to notice this trend we went back though to flag these errors for Michelle, the post production accountant for Men In Black III. In addition, this week I was introduced to the wonderful world of intern messenging. It was honestly a really enjoyable part of my week. I was sent with checks to the Weinstein company, walked through some pretty swanky and artsy buildings, brought the tax credit application to the government building on 3rd. It was a lot of fun to navigate thoughts subway system using hopstop and my iPhone map. With each completed messenger run, I felt as though I had done something genuinely important that would somehow help a movie and the greater film community. On wednesday Annie taught me how to organize the payroll envelopes that come for the various accountants working on various movies. Open the envelope. Check. Discard the top yep cover sheets. Check. Paper clip the whole invoice. Check. Copy the checks. Check. Place the invoice then the copies then the checks in the mailbox of the accountant who is handling that specific movie. That same day jessi and I sat in on their staff meeting where each woman went through the various trials and tribulations of their jobs that require a great deal of responsibility from outside parties, which f course isn't always a given. It was interesting to discover that as the week went on, I began to pick up more of the lingo and understand accounting terms all packed into one short sentence. Most of all I have enjoyed being involved in the NY film industry as small as my part may be. Visiting the offices of producers, filing vital tax credit applications to the governors office, and running envelopes through the maze of new York City has garnered me the type of experience that I specifically desired. I wanted to feel like an intern, run errands, learn about the behind the scenes and lengthy processes that go into successfully executing a film whether its budget is 8 million or 108 million dollars. Every movie is treated like a child, carefully nurtured through its infant and toddler stages by capable hands who finally release them into the world to face the public. Everyone holds their breath as it takes it's first steps and captures the hearts of its observers. And after these people have created and raised this child, they set it free and move on to the next one. Such is the fast-paced movie business.  My approximate daily schedule this week: Commute to city on 908 bus from park street; arrive at office at 10 am; leave office at 6 or 630 to make it to port authority for 625 or 655 bus to Montclair; Arrive in Montclair at around 730-8 p.m.