First Day High

Originally posted: June 6, 2007
by Mae S.

as many suckers for drama would do, I planned to write about my first day as an—ahem—intern. But no, work actually did not permit me to do so because during my first day, I have actually already experienced the monumental work moment—overtime.

Nonetheless, I have interesting stories to tell. After only two days and currently on my third day here at the ad agency, I have a surprising amount of things to talk about. My first day was like no other first day in fresh grad history—it was way too packed for a fresh grad’s own good.

I started the day meeting my very own cubicle and officemates in the near vicinity and being shown how my windows 98 computer works. In case you really want to know, it works fine, just like a computer should. After my meet and greet, I was given three binder’s worth of readings—I had to familiarize around 3 years of my account’s print ads. I have a good brand, by the way, and I now have a lot of respect for this brand that I used to think before now was not at all that “me”. After a while, I finally met my immediate supervisor--nice guy, told me right on na sasabak agad ako sa trabaho. I smiled, swallowed hard and said okay. Then it was off to this thing called offline.

Oh my gosh---working with clients and an actual TVC offline editing thing. To my surprise, Teta, a good friend of mine from UA&P, is so to speak—client. They told me this would happen, but I didn’t expect it ON MY FIRST DAY.

For those who will not be fortunate enough to experience agency life, let me tell you that there are buffet meals EVERYDAY with dessert!

Nah, just kidding… ☺ We had one that day, and the only reason why I’m mentioning it is because the cake, served to me by Direk was really yummy. I wanted to eat the whole thing but I was, like, the only girl there. Dyahe naman.

After lunch, I witnessed a momentous occasion where the creative guy blurted out a random idea that turned out to be a good storyboard concept. Everyone got excited and decided to shoot the damn thing that afternoon. So we did. We shot an animated story on the side of a Makati street in about 45 minutes. Lots of fun actually--just the kind of spontaneous agency activity that I always wanted to experience. And then we went on to the long and freezing part—color grading. Basically, it’s this really long process of improving the color of the commercial they shot. They do it by scene and by reel. There were about 3 reels. Each one took more than an hour it seemed. Just do the math for me.

Finally, after yet another yummy (and free!) meal, I went home at around 8:30 pm. Actually, I was chauffeured home. Part of production costs, don’t ask me why.

And that was the end of DAY ONE.