Digitizer's Job

Happy Easter!

First I want to congratulate all my friends who participated in Campus Movie Fest this year at Indiana University. I've been watching all your films and they always blow me away. I wish I could have been there to see them all on the big screen, as well as seeing my best friend Kathryn Begle host the show! All of you are so creative and talented, I know you will go on to do big things.

I love hearing about people landing internships here in LA for the summer! Congratulations to you all as well. I look forward to seeing more Hoosiers in Hollywood!! =)

As for you students graduating in less than a month, (AHHH! I know right? Crazy.) don't think you need to have everything figured out before that graduation date. YOU DON'T! Yes it is scary. Yes it is stressful, but what makes you think you'll have life figured out by the age of 22? Breath. It'll all work out. I've been talking to people about the transition from graduating to moving out here. I won't say it is easy, because it is not. It is very scary and stressful, but if I can do it...you can too. I promise.

I've also been dealing with my own stresses at work lately. As a digitizer, I work on all the shows of the entire company. If we have 5 shows in production, then I get shipments of XDCAM discs for 5 different shows. Recently I have been the ONLY digitizer for the company, which is a lot of work for only one person. One day my boss sent me home in the morning when I was sick. I think that's when it hit people, that I'm the only person that knows how to do my job, and without me they don't have anything to work on. One co-worker was rushing out of my work room then stopped and said, "You know you are the heart of this company, right? Without you the company stands still." Lots of pressure for one person, but I like it at the same time.

So, in order to stay on top of things I've been working 6 days a week. Let me give you a perspective of what I dealt with this past week. Before Wednesday I got 15 boxes of tapes (XDCAM discs, we still call them tapes). One box of tapes holds around 50 tapes. So after doing the math I got around 750 tapes just this week. I was swimming in tapes, literally.

A received my first compliment recently from an Editor who was being an Assistant Editor for The Real World for a few weeks. He told me, "Ashley, you are good at what you do. Very soon an AE will move up to Editor and then you will be bumped up to being an Assistant Editor. You can quickly see the people you can count on and put the pressure on. So keep up the good work." It made my day. You aren't given many compliments in this industry. Usually silence is golden. If you hear nothing back, you must have done your job right. When I first started being a digitizer I was not good. I made many mistakes and didn't understand how to do many things. So in the past 5 months I've been trying to prove myself. I think I'm finally getting there.

Keep your goals high and your head higher.