Dare To Live The Dream…

“Hello, may I please speak to the person in charge of your technical writers?” I asked the receptionist after I took a breath and made the phone call. The receptionist had no idea what to do with that request, so she patched me through to the person in charge of Ocean’s writers. Already I could tell that there’s no way they actually needed technical writers…

…and this is how I came to speak with the wonderful Diana Gage, Head of Production at Ocean Productions.

“Hello, my name is [bla-bla-bla], and I’m a recent graduate of…” I just did what I had been taught to do the past weeks. “… and I wanted to ask about your openings for technical writers.” Surely there’s a lot of technical stuff that goes on with voice recording, right?

“We don’t really have those here,” Diana told me. Crap. “What do you think we do here?”
“Voice recording.”
“Yes. I only work with scriptwriters here…”

I was boned.

I actually blogged about this part way back when and I worded it well back then, so I’ll just copy and paste here for effect:

We started talking about that more and more, about how it's quite hard to find good scriptwriters, and how it takes a lot of specific skills to get the work done. You need to be able to take a translation of a different language, turn it into natural-sounding English that fits the mouth flaps of the people on-screen, and it should be good enough that if you were to read the lines without the character name next to it, you can still figure out who's speaking.
But yeah, she had me very interested now, and she knew. So, she told me to e-mail her my résumé and we'd work from there.

The career facilitators were pretty happy to see me so active.

After I left that day, it really hit me: holy crap, I just applied for a job working in anime! It’s always the pipe dream that you might get to try this… but in my case, it was actually happening! I was seriously about to try to become an anime dub scriptwriter for The Ocean Group!

A few days later – again, following the training – I called Ocean Group again to follow-up on my e-mail. Again, I had a quick chat with Diana. This time, she asked me if I wanted to come in for a meeting. Goes without saying that I did…

I had a little less than a week to prepare for the interview. I got out, put together a portfolio (mostly involving theOtaku.com work I’ve done), bought a messenger bag that looked more professional than a green backpack, triple-checked how to get to Ocean Productions (far in the heart of western Vancouver)… when the day came, I borrowed a nice tie from my brother even…