Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Wow. Today Justin showed me how crazy and unpredictable life can be while working at Funimation (such as locking a guy in a room to watch 70+ hours of One Piece for the "Marooned on One Piece Island" marathon). I'm beginning to think that there aren't any normal days, despite what Justin had said on my first day. Every day is a new adventure and a different experience. Take this morning for example.

I'm shadowing Justin to learn about marketing and advertising. Nowhere in that description would one think that duties included going on the live stream live on Youtube for the "Marooned on One Piece Island". Yet, at around 10:30 on the morning of May 15th, I did exactly that. I was on Youtube, live, in front of a ton of One Piece fans. It was definitely an experience! In that moment (probably the wrong moment too) I realized just how personable Youtube personalities and others had to be in front of the camera. An unexpected lesson to learn, I'll do better next time (if there ever is one; there's a reason this post is titled Fifteen Minutes of Fame).

That wasn't the only neat thing to occur today. I ran into two voice actors: Duncan Brannan (Mr. 3 on One Piece) and Eric Vale (Sanji on One Piece, Trunks on Dragon Ball Z, Yuki Sohma in Fruits Basket, and America and Canada in Hetalia). Needless to say, I only found their credits after I met both of them. I watched Eric Vale in the recording room (don't remember the anime or the character's name, sorry!). It was super amazing. I would see him say and record the lines and it would be matched up with the character's mouth, then they would play the audio and visual together. There was a ton of work that was involved with dubbing, a lot more than I anticipated. That was a really fantastic experience; both Eric Vale and the technical professionals were amazing. The dubbing went by really quickly and they were very efficient.

My second day at Funimation was just as eventful as my first! I learned a lot more about the production side of Funimation; it's like a completely separate side from the business side of things. I learned that marketing is not a one man job and it takes a lot of people to collaborate and put together a commercial/trailer/poster/website. I learned that there is so much that goes behind the scenes that viewers don't realize. It's convention season, so Funimation has a booth at many of the conventions. They have to decide what to set up, where to put it, how to decorate it/the design of it, and the logistics such as getting the materials to places such as San Diego or Chicago. There's so much involved and marketing is right there in the middle of it all!

The reception area at Funimation.