My Many Meetings

Justin was out of the office today; he's busy representing Funimation at Anime Central in Chicago. So that means that today I was at meetings! Some of them my own and others at real company meetings. I first met with Stacy and Laura, who are part of the sales and distribution team at Funimation. I learned so much from them and gained a lot better understanding of what occurs in sales and distribution. For example, when a store has a sale, it's not just the store that takes the hit, but the company too. So many things go into a sale, such as deciding what items to put on sale (sales team), how many units to have ready (distribution team), how to market the sale (marketing), and any new graphics (graphic design team). I had no idea what an involved process that was until this morning.

After I talked with Stacy and Larua, I met with Walter from the trailers/motion graphics department. Can you say cool? He's one of the guys that makes the trailers and commercials for the Funimation shows. I learned about the artistic freedom that he has in making the trailers (a lot) and what the day to day duties of the job entails. One thing I learned so far is that everybody learned their craft on the job. Some majored in international relationships or in music managing, but aren't doing that here at Funimation (for the most part). Now I wonder how important what I study in college is versus what I will end up doing after college.

Then I had lunch and finished out the day with Mario, who is involved with everything! He sets the prices for the products and works closely with online streamers (like iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, XBox, etc). Not only did he let me sit in on a ton of meetings, he gave me an in-depth tour of Funimation! I saw where the scripts were translated, post-editing work was done, the sound mixing room, and more. I really enjoyed sitting in on the conference calls with other companies and learned how business was conducted. It involves a lot of conference calls (scheduled, weekly calls) and emails in between. Everything today was really fantastic; I enjoyed learning what other people did and how they accomplished their jobs.

My "desk" at Funimation.

Dr. Horrible in an office!

The hallway of translators, script editors, and advisors.

What makes the digital copies of shows imported from Japan.