UC Merced Magazine | Commemorative Chronicle

JAVIER SERVIN ’10 SENIOR MEDIA ARCHIVIST Paramount pictures

“As a guard, I appreciated the number of people needed to set up a shot just to get a few seconds on lm,” he said. “ at’s why, for me, there’s nothing like watching a movie on a big screen. It’s a communal experience.” Servin also creates and hosts a video series on California history. Subjects range from the L.A. County Poor Farm to the Cabazon Dinosaurs. For the project, Servin, a native of Huntington Park, adopted the name Foo Howser — a nod to Chicano slang (foo means "friend") and the legendary Golden State chronicler Huell Howser. He has 32,000 TikTok followers and more than 31,000 views on YouTube. ...ALWAYS A Bobcat Servin brought a lifelong love of libraries and an associate’s degree in history to UC Merced, where he got a student job processing and shelving books at the library. En route to a bachelor’s degree in history in 2010, he was active in the campus MEChA club, mentored by Professor Sholeh Quinn and a regular customer at J&R Tacos. “Before I considered going there, I couldn’t have found Merced on a map,” Servin said. “I never even thought of working at a library until I came to UC Merced.” UCMERCED MAGAZINE 64

If you enjoyed “Top Gun: Maverick” or “A Quiet Place” on the big screen or watched a “Star Trek” or “Yellowstone” episode at home, give Javier Servin ’10 some thanks. He and his team at Paramount in Los Angeles ensure every lm and TV show from the studio is packaged with the goodies today’s viewers expect, actor thumbnails, display formats, director’s commentary and closed captioning in numerous languages. Assets are organized in an indexed database. Servin compared it to a restaurant kitchen that is not only well-stocked but stocked well. “We make sure everything is accessible so when someone reaches into the database, they get what they want,” he said. Servin has been a Paramount archivist for 12 years. Before that, he spent three years as a security guard at the studio. At an in-house screening of “Airplane!”, Servin the watchman asked a Paramount executive what he needed to do to become an archivist. Get a master’s degree in the discipline from UCLA, she said. He did, working graveyard security shi s and taking classes during the day. Servin said his rst Paramount job prepped him for the second.