Back to the Future

Week 1 at GMA

I was assigned to the Editing team of the Program Management Department, or I should say I had myself re-assigned there from the News Department. This is so because on the “Duties and Responsibilities” handout of the News Department, it only said “Observing” under post-production. So there I was expecting to edit canned shows and anime. I knew I wasn’t going to be exposed to, for lack of a better term, “real” editing since these were canned shows. I also knew that the Post-production Department handled the kind of editing I would want to be exposed to but unfortunately, the Post-production Department of GMA are a bunch of recluses (read: they don’t accept interns).

Program Management’s Editing Team are a bunch of friendly people, I couldn’t ask for any other helpful and kind group to mingle with. I scheduled my internship on Mondays and Tuesdays and so on my first Monday, the unspoken obligatory norm of introductions took place. What followed, would I guess be the second unspoken obligatory norm, the introductory lecture followed by hours of observation. And so Sir Eric Barba, the head of the Editing team, briefed me on the daily grind and how to use the machines… The Machines. I knew I was going to be editing canned shows thus I imagined just simple editing, splicing, adding title cards and the like. But I honestly wasn’t prepared for what was placed before me. The grand daddy of what we call editing paraphernalia. We now have Final Cut Pro but then there was the Beta. Linear editing was right before my eyes. There were Digi Betas but Betas were the superior race. Sir Eric told me to watch him edit, he was editing “Pangarap na Ginto” to be aired the following Sunday on SNBO. Of course I didn’t get half of how he was doing this, his hands were trained with time and so to me they were moving at warp speed, with me mentally gaping.

Tuesday was patching day. Sir Jeff taught (or aggravatingly tried to teach) me how to patch the dubbing station (aka the recording station). This is where they use the original tapes from abroad to record into their own beta or digi beta tapes. If you’re picturing the patching of your typical home surround sound system, you are mistaken my friend. There are 6 machines thus numerous combinations of patches. I’ll try to take a photo of it but for now I can only say that there are about 4 levels of patching at work and that doesn’t even include the synching you have to do to the two tapes. Sir Jeff ran through it then tested me by asking be to patch one machine to another, it took me about 3 times to get it right. I was so embarrassed at my imbecility. After recovering from my utter failure, Sir Roly instructed me to watch upcoming episodes of Love City (hours of Jerry Yan can make one nauseous). He wanted me to choose where to strategically cut the scene to insert commercials. So I cut the whole episode into about 3 parts. There I was cutting at cheesy and somewhat predictable parts, doing what I considered typical. This is entertainment.