Blogocentric Formulations

A Day In The Life

I'm not actively participating in the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  this month, but today's prompt caught my attention so I thought I'd do a little unofficial blogging and answer today's prompt anyway.

PROMPT: Take us through a day in your life at your job/career. Talk about some of the more important responsibilities you have as well as what your major tasks entail. It’s always interesting to see how others work


For anyone that doesn't know what my job is, I work in the business and legal affairs department of a movie studio. My specific job is to oversee the screen credits for all of our feature films and television series. In a nutshell, I'm responsible for:

Making sure the screen credits are accurate and delivered on time.

Making sure everybody is credited who needs to be.

Making sure our credits adhere to all legal requirements (contracts, guilds/unions, company precdents, etc.)

Communicate credit/legal requirements to other departments (marketing, finance, distribution, etc.) so everybody knows what requirements/restrictions are in place.

Review all ancillary materials (trailers, TV spots, posters, concession cups, merchandise, billboards, radio spots, co-promotional assets, etc.) to make sure legal requirements are being followed.

Ultimately, that means my job consists of two major parts: (1) working on the credits for our current shows, and (2) reviewing stuff to make sure those credits are right. What that looks like practically is a whole lot of time sitting at a computer, responding to emails and calling people on the phone.

The things about my job that are probably the most difficult are that I'm the only one that does what I do at the company, so I don't really ever get a break. Vacations, sick days, etc. are still spent near my phone and computer because anything I put off for a day or two ultimately is still something I'm responsible for handling. And since we're shooting movies all over the world at all times of year, the emails and requests are pretty much 24/7. If I work a normal 9am-6pm, there's a good chance that I'm still getting 20+ emails between the hours of 6pm-9am from the production shooting in Australia, or a location scout in South Korea, or coworkers at the sound stages in Atlanta who are getting caught up on emails before they start shooting for the day.

My work is basically a consistent deluge of questions and requests and clarifications on things, and I have to figure out time to actually work on the credits (review contracts, update my credits documents, work with our titles vendor to output actual credit files for the show, etc.) in between.

I start most mornings getting caught up on the emails I've missed from the night before. Answering the handful of questions that came in, keeping up on what's going on where in the world. I try to get started early enough that I can get some credits work done on one of our shows before marketing gets up and going, because once that happens, I'm getting a constantly flow of about 100-200 emails a day with assets to review.

"Please look at this set of character posters and let me know if there are any problems."

"Here's a press kit for the new movie, are all the credits right?"

"These are six different versions of the teaser trailer. Any issues with any of them?"

"Here's a set of 250 collectible trading cards. Are these okay?"

"Please review these 1,200 set photos and let us know if any of them should be removed from the keysets."

The tricky part is that a lot of these requests come with different deadlines. Some I have several days to address, others need responses within 24 hours, if not faster. So I'll set aside blocks of time to work on the credits (30-60 minutes at a time) where I can focus and make some real progress, and then I'll transition back to my emails and see what's come in over that period of time. I'll look at the deadlines attached to each request, respond to the time-sensitive ones right away, make a note of which ones I need to go back to later, and then transition back to doing the credits for one of our shows for a bit. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the day.

I'll usually check in at least once later in the evening, just to make sure nothing critical popped up during dinner and the kids' bedtime routine. And then I'll wake up and check my email first thing to do the same.

It's a really, really demanding job, but I also love what I do. Being able to contribute something tangible to the movies I enjoy watching as a fan is an amazing feeling, and my job has such a diverse blend of responsibilities that I never get bored. If I get tired of staring at contracts and credits documents, I have materials to review. If I get tired of materials to review, I have correspondence and calls with other departments to return. I get to talk to vendors and the producers and pretty much everybody at the company in some capacity or another. For a desk job, that's pretty cool.