Honestly, I’m one of those who got an early start with cameras. It was actually in elementary school in Miami, Florida that I started doing work with video. There we filmed morning announcements and recorded special events for our school. By the time I was in junior high, I had been accepted into a magnet program for broadcasting. But that summer, I moved to nowhere’sville, Arizona. Lake Havasu City to be exact. I exchanged the beaches and heat for deserts and, well, more heat. I took a break from the video stuff until high school, where we found one of the strongest video programs in the state, right there in LHC.
We had great fun filming for the school, filming sports, and other shorts like “RC Cars from Hell,” Star Trek spoofs, and others. All this on ½“ VHS… aghmm tape. Yes. Tape. And I just dated myself.
From there, I moved on to undergraduate work at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff as a broadcasting major, where I did a little bit of everything, nearly every day. Live news, documentary, sports, and single camera narrative for four years. We had plenty of classes, but the real learning took place away from the desk and in the edit bay.
About 3 months before I graduated, I started getting antsy. Los Angeles was an obvious place to go. Not far from home. But I didn’t have any job prospects yet. Truthfully, I was afraid. While I had a lot of collegiate experience, it was not professional experience. I approached one of my professors in a fit of desperation, and he reached out to one of his friends, Price Hicks, who was running the educational division of the Television Academy in LA.
She gave us a few names to contact, one of which was an Emmy Award winning producer named Michael Gallant. I called all of them, but only got a hold of Michael. Unfortunately, Michael was in the middle of prepping for a film, and as an independent producer, he didn’t necessarily have a role for me to fill. I did a road trip to LA looking for jobs. I went to Sony studios in Culver, and dropped off a resume where the receptionist told me, “Leave it here. I run them upstairs every hour.”
Disappointed, I returned to NAU, where I was trying to apply to an internship through the Television Academy. To this day, the Television Academy continues to facilitate this internship placing more than 30 students in industry positions for 8 weeks every summer. Within a couple of weeks I found myself a finalist for the internship in the area of producing for television. One day before I graduated, I received a call from the Television Academy. They congratulated me on winning their internship and I would have the opportunity to work on a television movie with a highly respected producer. His name was Michael Gallant.
He was just as surprised as I was, and my contacting him a few weeks prior didn’t officially help, but I don’t know that it hurt my chances either. Needless to say, I was thrilled, and had an open door to Los Angeles.
I worked on the film immediately after graduation as Michael’s assistant. I had no idea what I was doing. I was a content creator, so this world of fax machines, meetings, and pagers was brand new to me. I was lost.
I did learn a lot, and as all things go in Los Angeles, I saw this gig come to an end. My next job was on the Emmy Awards broadcast working in the offices of Don Mischer. After that ended I day played on several shows such as Who’s Line Is It Anyways and even some productions with New Horizons (Roger Corman’s outfit). The freelance world was exhausting mentally and physically, and soon found myself at a small post production house in Burbank for two years.
But here are some take-aways from my experience:
The best learning is hands on learning. While I appreciated my college education, I developed my skills while getting my hands dirty.
Perseverance pays off. Just because something you want to do doesn’t materialize in a few months, or even a few years, if this is your passion, allow time to be on your side to help develop and hone your skills. I’ve told many people who wanted to go to LA- just go. Go and be a receptionist or assistant, a reader, whatever it takes to get your foot in the door. Because proficiency and competence are valuable. And if you’re good, you won’t be answering phones for long, and you’ll find ways to move up.
If you do what you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
Set goals. Write them down. Give them a time frame. But at least write them down. And then refer to my second takeaway above.
My story continues on from there, but that’s how I got my start. In some ways it seems like it was a long time ago, in some ways, it seems like it was yesterday.
In those early days in Los Angeles, I saw a lot of growth in myself. But one area I was neglecting. One crucial area. But I was in LA, and had the world at my feet.