Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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D’oh! I only watched the finished version before making my post.
It’s all lovely stuff. Thanks for posting.
[Todd Terry] “you must start breaking those pills in half. We’re begging you.”
Half of one? Actually, I’m thinking I need to double up on whole pills.
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Hey Todd, post the video storyboard too. It would be very cool to see them side by side.
We had an article in the magazine that talked about this, btw. They only had the budget for a few hours on location, so they mapped out EVERYTHING – every angle, every dolly, the whole shebang. They also mapped out the edit – timing, music, etc. – to help keep post on time and on budget too.
The article is called “Fix It In ‘Pre’: Workflow Starts Before the Shooting Does.” Includes lots of photos of the finished piece, but also test shoots in the office, and the movies for the animatic and the final project. Check it out.
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[Jeff Bonano] “Tim is….like…Lassie or something like that?”
Happy cows come from California and Timmy’s in the well.
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If a thread morphs such that it needs a new thread, I start it.
But if a thread morphs so that the evolving conversation only makes sense in the context of previous posts in the same thread, then I change the subject line.
This particularly makes sense for people who view the forum with new posts at the top, but it’s still useful in thread view. For example, in this thread, it helps to see that not every post in this long line is about exactly the same thing.
Progress and accuracy, man. I dig it.
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[Bob Zelin] “Very un nerving. I can assure you that the management of Creative Cow must be feeling the same thing – watching all their competitiors die, as they expand and thrive”
Rather than feeling unnerved by watching competitors die, we feel pretty good about it. 🙂 The particular irony is that a number of those very people got in Ron’s face quite recently, to tell him that they were going to put him out of business. Oops.
As Ron said, it’s also not that much of a surprise to see them going down. Anybody could see that these magazines looked weaker and weaker. They would have gone under eventually. We just sped it up. Okay, maybe sped it up a lot. I think that we’re currently standing at 4 major magazines going out of print since we started the Cow mag – is that right, Ron?
Bringing up what Walter said, though – we devoted an entire issue of the Cow magazine to this, our “Think Big” issue. The theme is that things aren’t going to get “better” – they’re just going to keep changing. The question is, what are you doing to take advantage of new opportunities? Walter’s answer – invest now to get more for your money – is one of many possible really good answers.
Waiting is not much of an answer.
I don’t mean to sound glib about any of this. It’s not that we don’t sweat, ever, about anything. It’s that what keeps us up late at night is our enthusiasm, rather than our nervousness. The cool thing about the Think Big issue is that we saw that we’re far from the only ones for whom this is true. We took a lot of inspiration from that issue. It has made us try harder, and, yes, think bigger.
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[John Baumchen] “We always ship the gear out a week in advance via FedEx….”
I forgot to mention this. Shipping in advance is great. We’ve also used priority mail for extra clothes, books, or other doo-dads to make the airplane stuff easier to deal with.
Everything has always come through fine.
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Time to start changing your mind about what “carry on” means.
I’ve been traveling like crazy on family business in the past few months – going back well before Hot Pants – and on more than two-thirds of our recent flights, we wound up carrying NOTHING on. Not our choice. There’s now somebody standing at the end of the jetway, right before you get on the plane, tagging your bag and taking it straight to the cargo hold.
My previously fine rollaboard has been tagged and grabbed nearly every time. My wife’s much smaller bag has been getting hit more and more – and seriously, more than two-thirds of the time.
The good news is that this is a fantastic way to work around checked luggage. You roll your heavy-ass, almost compliant bag down the ramp. Instead of wrestling it into ever-smaller overhead bins, you hand it to a kind professional who walks it down the stairs, and places it in the hold themselves.
No kidding. People are a lot more careful with your bag when you look them in the eye, say their name, and thank them. “Rebecca or Raoul or Rahim or Roger, thanks for taking this. I really appreciate it.” They beam. “Take care! Have a great trip!” Dude, it’s awesome. Milk of human kindness. You can watch your luggage carried down the stairs like there was an actual baby tucked in it.
Then on the other end, your bag is hand-carried back to the jetway! It never gets flung around to ride on a ramp. It basically gets put right in your hand. This is awesome.
Variations: in one airport, they actually put the cart RIGHT THERE, sheltered so that the opening is just inside the gate. YOU are the one who places your bag lovingly on the cart. In another airport just yesterday, they hand carried our luggage all the way into the terminal, and carefully placed it in a row, leaning against the seats just inside the door. They even extended the handles!!! By the time I walked off the plane, it was literally ready to roll – I didn’t even break step. (Honest, I did it just to see if I actually COULD do it without breaking step.)
I never intended to find out that our laptops travel just fine in these circumstances. But they do. Perfectly. I now LOOK for the chance to hand off my bag, rather than carry it myself…
…but I keep control of it. **I** am the one who makes sure that my bag makes every connection, because I still roll it everywhere myself. I just never lift it, and never let it out of my sight until it goes into the cargo hold by hand, not by conveyor belt.
I freaking HATE flying. No fear, just loathing. But this is rapidly becoming my favorite part.
PS. Your mileage will absolutely vary, and goodness knows that I’ve gotten pulled aside for one thing or another many, many times….but I’ve never been pulled aside for anything electronic, and only asked to turn on a laptop once. (Although I still have my computer asleep, not turned all the way off – when I go through security – never hurts.)
Even the 7 trips I’ve made in recent weeks (don’t ask), it has been more or less business as usual — and that includes a flight this week through National, right in the heart of Washington DC. There’s plenty of stuff to hate about air travel, but this is the least of the things that will annoy you.
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One of the many, many reasons that millions of Mac users…like me…are using solutions like BootCamp and VMware Fusion. There are too many PC-only applications that are absolutely critical to making your life, and especially your business life, easier…a reality that Apple has clearly acknowledged by investing millions of dollars to support Windows.
No worries about hating Windows, which many dual-OS users still do. Substitute the Win control key for the Mac command key in keyboard shortcuts, and you’re mostly done. You’ll find that Quickbooks, as well as the “real” version of Quicken, make easy sense to use, and are more than worth that minor effort to manage keyboard shortcuts.
And if that’s really a stumbling block, there’s a free utility you can download to remap Windows commands to your Mac keyboard.
Improved productivity and more efficient collection of money from your clients are at hand. Go for it.
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National Geographic was an early adopter of HD, and said that they’re in on 3D too.
Not that Discovery might not have forced a Nat Geo announcement.
Lotso other 3D news from CES that I’ll be posting elsewhere, but one business element came screaming out at me. When the first all-HD network went up, people had already bought between 1 and 2 million HD sets.
There are already between 100 and 150 million 3D-ready sets in people’s homes.
Wow. Pretty solid platform to start from.
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