My summer with a hippopotamus

Finding a summer internship is hard. Finding one in the entertainment industry is even harder. For the last three years, Thanksgiving has marked one event more meaningful than turkey: beginning the dreaded quest for a summer job.

By the time April rolls around, after I’ve filed more than a hundred resumes and applications, the possibility of being jobless becomes apparent. Students are told that if they get good grades, attend a competitive college, involve themselves in a variety of extracurriculars and have a genuine love for what they do, everything will work out.

But that doesn’t cut it anymore these days. The eager college student is left struggling to find that perfect internship that will somehow translate itself into an exciting job after graduation. Getting an internship should not be this difficult! Yet somewhere during that final fortnight of last-minute desperation in April, a phone call is placed or an e-mail arrives offering some unbeknownst position.

Enter DUCK Studios.

DUCK Studios offered me a summer internship in Los Angeles as a computer animation production assistant. DUCK is a leading independent animation studio. Dreams of working on groovy commercials for companies like M&M’s, Wal-Mart and McDonalds quickly entered my mind. I would learn the necessary skills to facilitate working for the behemoth of all computer animation companies: Pixar. And going to L.A.! Wow! I was heading to Hollywood; I was on my way to being somebody!

My dreams quickly changed. Somewhere between not having a car, working an additional job at night to make ends meet and leaving my friends behind, the California dream seemed less intoxicating. I also realized after about a week how much I can’t stand spending six hours a day modeling animation on a computer. I guess I am an English major at heart after all.

Just as the grandeur of my summer adventure was beginning to fade, Kozo came into my life.

Kozo is a 600-pound, thong-wearing, ex-Sumo wrestling, purple hippopotamus. One of the first side projects DUCK gave me was to turn Kozo into an Internet phenomenon like the dancing baby from 1999. DUCK was pitching Kozo as an animated series. His present form consisted of a minute-long online trailer, in which he shook his booty to “The Thong Song.” It was hysterical, but how do you make something a phenomenon? That’s probably every advertiser’s goal, and I, with no advertising experience, was supposed to make this happen in my spare time.

Kozo received about 50 hits per day during his first two months, prior to my assignment in mid-May. By mid-June, Kozo was garnering daily hits as high as 47,000! Score one for the intern!

Once Kozo had gotten his groove on and let his blubber fly before more than 250,000 online users, DUCK’s executive team wanted to learn my secret. (I think the college kid surprised them by creating a small phenomenon.)

The bottom line is that Kozo was funny and well animated. Once the right people saw and liked Kozo, they would pass him along for me. The true mission was getting it to those people.

The right people were not network executives or animation scholars. I targeted geeks. I had to make sure they discovered Kozo, because then they would begin posting Kozo to the Internet’s equivalent of a free-publicity gold mine: Weblogs, known as “blogs” for short.

I posted ads for Kozo on all the major animation discussion boards on the Internet to make sure animation aficionados would see him. Then I went to chatrooms. Every chatroom, no matter what the subject, was full of teens. Target audience found. Score two for the intern! After devoting several days to spreading Kozo via chatrooms, hits to the Kozo Web site aggrandized. From there, Kozo started popping up on blogs all over the world, most frequently in Europe and in Russia.

Kozo was beginning to earn international fame. Wow!

So as is the case in life, what you start out working towards may finish up as something different altogether. I came to California expecting to create the next Finding Nemo. Instead, I got to contribute toward starting a small Internet fad. Walt Disney used to say, “It all started with a mouse.” In my case, it all started with a 600-pound, thong-wearing, ex-Sumo wrestling purple hippopotamus.

Now that my internship at DUCK is over, I return to Vanderbilt University to finish my senior year knowing that my career plans may morph into something different when I cross the finish line.

Gerard Raiti is a senior at Vanderbilt University.

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