My entry into the contest...

I’m not sure exactly when I first heard about the careerbuilder.com dream job contest. Perhaps it was on Ricky Birgante’s Inside the Magic Podcast. But I first seriously considered it after hearing it on the official Disneyland podcast. The contest solicited entries to become a Disney cast member for a day. There were five categories: Pirate, Parade Performer, Princess, Jungle Cruise Skipper and Haunted Mansion Butler/Maid.

I’ve always loved the Haunted Mansion. In particular, I’ve been intrigued by the special effects used there. Anyone that knows me knows that I love Halloween and that I love building automated props to scare and entertain people. So the opportunity to peek behind the scenes at the Haunted Mansion was too good to pass up. Now, I’ll admit that an entry level position working as a cast member isn’t completely my idea of a dream job. My true dream job would be as a member of the team of Imagineers – designing new attractions for the theme parks. But that wasn’t being offered. So I’ll have to settle for the next best thing.

The contest required entrants to produce a 45 second video that explains why they are qualified for and/or want their dream job. I’ve put together a few family videos in the past, so I found this aspect of the contest interesting. My first inclination was to put together a spooky Night Gallery/Hitchcock style monologue that would be appropriate for a role in the Haunted Mansion. But then I thought that it would be better to tell some kind of story within the 45 seconds. I wanted to focus on creating an entertaining scenario that would play out in the short time period. I know that most Disney attractions start out with a back story and that’s how I would approach my video.

The idea I came up with was to present myself as a ghost instructor teaching a class of the newly departed in the hopes that they could take on the role of the 1000^th ghost in the Haunted Mansion. I thought about the story at night while trying to fall asleep and the next day I wrote up a screen play version of what I had in mind (you can read the original script if you wish).

At this point, I didn’t discuss the contest with anyone. I enjoyed the exercise of writing the screen play and I thought it was half way decent. But I knew that unless I got support from others, the idea would remain just that. So I decided to share my idea with my wife, Laura. I figured that if she thought the idea was good, she would push me to carry through and actually make the video a reality. When I read her the script, her reaction was positive and as I had hoped, she encouraged me to do it. Then she asked how far off the deadline was… a little less than two weeks.