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I was taken into the private screening rooms with the directors where they preview and fine-tune their films several weeks or months before they are released. The first day on the job, I enjoyed sitting in on a screening of a film with the director sitting in the seat behind mine making comments. After the final adjustments were made, that film, Step Up, came out in theaters, and is doing very well. I screened another movie later that week, but I can't give the name yet. However, I can say that from what I've seen in the works, this coming year should be a very strong one for Disney.

I also went to viewings of “dailies.” That's where they get the film footage back from the developing lab the day after the shoot and you can see how the raw footage looks in the screening room. It's funny to see the unedited footage with mistakes and goof-ups that don't ever make it in the final movie. One example of a mistake I saw was during a glamorous sort of love scene between a guy and girl sitting on a railing at night. Their heads moved closer together slowly, but right as their lips were about to kiss, the wind started up and blew the girl's hair all in her face. They also had me hand-deliver a copy of the new Disney logo with fireworks around the Castle to the editor so he could see how to sync up the picture and sound. So, I saw bits and pieces of some movies, and full screenings of others in their current rough state. I can't specify which ones I've seen full screenings of, but I can simply list all the movies that I've seen parts or all of. The Guardian, Enchanted, Bridge to Terabithia, Step Up, The Santa Clause 3, Underdog, Wild Hogs, and Pirates of the Caribbean 3.

During my time at Disney, everyone had been anxiously awaiting the first week's box office results of Pirates of the Caribbean 2. I was told that it's like getting a report card at the end of the year, where you see whether or not all your hard work paid off. As you know, Pirates 2 ended up having the number one opening in history! It was neat to be at the studio where history had just been made, although they couldn't afford to take time out to celebrate since they were already hard at work on the third Pirates movie.

It's cool when you walk into the Disney studios. The first things you see are statues of the seven dwarves on a ledge about five stories up and they are holding up the roof with their hands. They represent how Walt Disney's first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, provided the capital to purchase that land on Buena Vista Street in Burbank to build an entire studio. These original buildings still stand and many have been restored. There are columns with vines and the whole place is beautiful. Everyday I passed the original multiplane camera that created all the old classics, like Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Sleeping Beauty, etc. One day I was walking on the sidewalk in front of one of the Pirates' sound stages. I saw workers doing something to a fake tree that didn't have any leaves. I passed by again 20 minutes later and the tree was covered in thick green leaves. Then on my last pass-by, the tree also had purple berries dangling from all of its branches. A lot of their props are changeable so they can be used in different movies for different purposes.

I got an extensive tour of the Technicolor lab, where Disney's film is developed and processed. I also got a tour of “TDI,” which stands for Technicolor Digital Intermediate, where they do many of the digital effects and color adjustments in their movies. It was captivating to see the method that one lady used to remove miniscule dust specs on the film, frame by frame, to make sure Ashton Kutcher's blue jacket didn't have any specs covering it up. I got to observe at a couple additional top visual effects houses including Pac Title and Flash Film works, where many of the visual effects for The Guardian were being done.

Of the various movies that I was involved in over the summer, there was one that I did make some contributions to. For about two weeks, I was a Production Assistant for post production on “The Guardian,” starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher. However, there was only time for me to work on that show (they call movies “shows”) for two weeks because of everything else Disney had planned for me, which obviously wasn't long enough to get any kind of credit at the end. I basically had too many great opportunities all at the same time. While on The Guardian, I did things such as calling the actors and agents to make sure they knew what time to show up for ADR, writing down names and corrections to the ending credits, giving the actors their lunches, calling different visual effects houses, etc. This has supposedly been one of those groundbreaking movies that took a couple years for them to figure out how they could do it, before they actually started. I observed the brilliant visual effects artists painstakingly creating mist and spray over many of the shots. No other filmmakers have been able to create digital mist, spray, and water that looked this realistic before. I also was on the ADR stage with many of the main actors, such as Kevin Costner and the rest.

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