Game On…

It was early February of 2008 when I finally met Diana Gage face to face. Wonderful woman, very easy to talk to and with an absolutely calming voice; considering she was the Head of Production here, I could see how that could be useful. I remember walking up into the office area of Ocean Production just thinking about how this was the place where they make anime dubs. Well, that, and how I was crazy enough to try to get in on it.

I won’t say too much about my visit since I signed a confidentiality clause saying I wouldn’t. I’ll just say that Diana confirmed a lot about the current state of the industry for me, she had been working at Ocean for a long time and has seen how things have changed… and when I mentioned Ranma 1/2 as a personal favourite, she smiled wide.

Bottom line, though, was that she was willing to give me a try as an ADR scriptwriter. She gave me a take-home test that basically consisted of writing a dub script, e-mailed me some files which I could use to do it, and more or less told me to just e-mail her if I had any questions. It was interesting to see how they actually did process their ADR scripts and what kind of formatting they used for it, so already it was a really cool experience for any fan. And yes, I e-mailed her plenty. But she was cool like that, and was very accommodating to my ignorant ways.

It was only half an episode of anime I needed to write the script for, but it still took me about a week to finish. Well, Diana said it was still pretty good time for a first try, so that was good enough for me. So I just needed to give her a few days to look over it.

A week later, I asked her how things were; she told me she had been sick with the flu and hadn’t time to look at anything really. Another week or two of waiting later left me messed up and paranoid – I think I also had a bad dream one night too.

Thankfully, when Diana did get back to me it was in the positive. She said I did very well for a first try. I was good about picking lines and only had a little bit of trouble in knowing how many words actually fit at a time – she did say that gets fixed by sitting in for voice recording sessions, though, so I was really more excited than not. I was ready and willing to learn.

Though of course, willing to work and having work are two very different things. In February of 2008, Ocean didn’t really have a lot of projects running at the time. Death Note was midway through running on TV, as were a couple other things here and there, but that was basically it. They didn’t have any work for me yet.

Diana told me to keep in touch every now and then to see how things were looking. Again, I thanked her.

In my later contacts with the job finding club, I was always happily giving the good news. I was working with an anime website which could lead to good things and I was going to be a scriptwriter for a very well known Vancouver production company! I was actually about to live the ultimate fan dream: I was going to work with anime as an actual job.