During my first day of the Work Experience Program, I started out at Trailblazers Studios. Trailblazers is a video production studio that does everything from developing ideas to editing material. Today started at the first stage of video production: development. Going in, I didn’t know much about this stage in the process. What exactly did the development team do? I shadowed Makenna and Sydney, who are part of the development team at Trailblazers, to find out. As they shared different reals and clips they had put together for pitches, I learned that their job is to come up with ideas for different shows, documentaries, etc. Once they find people or concepts that fit the bill, they conduct interviews and gather footage to put together a short clip to pitch to different companies who might want to put the show on their platform. They put in all this work and most of the time their ideas are turned down. It’s a unique field because they have to do a little of everything: they have to create the idea, produce some film, edit the film down to a real, and pitch the ideas to different companies. I learned that the two women in the development office that I shadowed spend most of their days brainstorming by scouring the internet. They collaborate and stay very busy with multiple projects at one time. Today we spent most of the day looking at different projects they were working on. I even got to help find people that would be willing to be on a specific project Sydney was working on. This particular example was a short 5-minute-long miniseries that would air on Snapchat if approved. Overall it was a great first day full of learning and laughs.