[Mark Suszko]

Another way to go is to save your information to DVD, as the raw media files, as data, not as an MPEG2 stream. This takes 2-3 DVD-R’s to archive on, but functionally works like keeping all the original files on a hard drive, anf the disks are cheap.

[Mark Suszko]

There are two basic types of C.V. the chronologocal and the functional. For what you want to do, a functional one is better, it concentrates on describing the skills and talents you picked up and applied at each job. You describe your title and what you did, and a very short one or two-sentence story of how the wonderful way you did so-and-so led to this-and-such increased revenue or whatever.

Example entry: “Intern at Average Pictures inc. In charge of overnight tape digitizing and prep for day editors. Improved tape logging by applying database techniques which made searching footage easier and more accurate. Saved our clients an average of two hours per editing job over old methods. (dates of work)”

In the left margin across from this entry, there’s a short slug that describes the talent, like: “Improved efficiency and productivity”.

The sample entry and any others that fit the category all go together in this section, regardless of chronology.

So, your res has a main goal statement at the top, with a description of your biggest asset, then the list down the left margin of main areas, with detail sections centered just across from the listings.

opening blah blah blahxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
intro intro intro stuff:

Creative YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
problem- YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
solving: YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY(1987-1989)
yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy (1989-1992)

Client
Contact hhhhhhhhh h h hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Skills: hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh (2003-2005)

etc etc.

If you’re clever, you will write these so they match closely some of the requirements listed in the job opening listing. This also helps overcome or obscure gaps or short stints in your work history.

I have to disagree with the notion about visually punching up your resume. Not that I don’t like to see good layout, but times have changed and dramatic changes in H.R. procedures have affected resumes too, mostly in the larger companies and the search firms that are often hired by smaller companies.

You see, most cover letters and resumes are not read by humans any more, they are first read by machines. They come in, and are run thru an OCR scanner in the HR department, then a very simplistic program sifts the OCR files and counts keywords assigned by the HR department. The number of times the keywords appear then generates a machine-scored value to the resume that’s supposed to pre-screen for the candidates that make the best fit for the requirements. It also is supposed to eliminate human psychological biases and predjudices from the process, besides making it way faster and cheaper to plow thru a pile of applications.

What this means for your resume is that all the work you put into the layout, the selection of type face and paper, etc is for naught. Indeed, anything that’s hard for the OCR scanner to decipher is just ignored, or scored as a typo (with a negative score value assigned to it). The process is very much like the trick webmasters do to drive search engines to a site: planting a thousand invisible keywords in the opening source code of the site artificially improves the sites relevance ranking to search engines.

If your very nicely worded text lacks the precise keywords, you flunk the gatekeeper test. Say you’re an editor. If you say you have 15 years experience in developing and using multiple NLE platforms, you score lower on the machine than a guy that says: “I am proficient in Avid Express, Avid Media Composer, have seen an Avid Symphony, and read Avid web sites”. That guy gets scored as “knowing” 4 “avids”, though he admits to “knowing” only 2, and you my friend, scored zero, you’ll never get your resume in front of the person in charge of editing, who KNOWS the difference, because you didn’t get past the HR department’s gatekeeping OCR scanner. Likewise, multi-page resumes may lose all the info from the second page in places where the OCR process is sloppy, so put your best stuff on page one. The functional resume format is also good for this.

At some point, if your salmon of a resume manages to swim up this stream of machine-sorting, it only *then* gets read and evaluated by a human being, and at that point, yes, those intangibles regarding layout and design sense and reading between the lines to assess your character may have a positive effect. But to my way of thinking, you’d do better closely analyzing the wording of the job ad, and make sure you use the exact keywords as often as possible, to “beat the machine” doorkeeper first.

[Mark Suszko]

We have Sonicfire and it might be just the thing for you. Garage Band and The Apple looping program are also nice, but those require you to have a little more musical or at least rythmic ability to get a usable product. But Sonicfire, hey, a monkey could run it,it’s like musical legos, and it sounds like custom composed music.

[Mark Suszko]

I think every dedicated editor/director/producer feels like that about most of their projects, they are never ‘finished’ so much as finally abandoned to the client’s care at some point… I think you are asking some very good questions in your post, but people can give you many differnet answers to most of them, like Matt says, so much of it has to come from your own self and what the specific material needs, that a hard and fast rule most often is a poor fit for variable situations. Over time, you pick up or invent many of your own rules, or you absorb them unconsciously from work you admire. Writing them down or expressing them to others for critique may help you find a new appreciation for them.

One example: One of my personal rules for keying thirds is, leave it up long enough to read it thru at a normal speed, two times. A corollary to the rule is, if you’re supering it while someone is simutaneously saying that information, hold it until a beat after they finish saying it, or you’re distracting the viewer’s eye from the person speaking, dividing their attention so neither the spoken words nor the key can have their full effect. I think my rule can be expanded to rolls and crawls, that is, each name you pick out from the bunch should be readable two times before it leaves the screen. OTOH, often some other factor drives the speed of title rolls at the end of a show.

I don’t really know enough about you or your work to be making too many pronouncements, but I daresay, the day you can’t learn something new about lighting is the day you should leave the business. Really great lighting direction will make even corporate lectures shot with a cr@ppy camera look like network quality. And the best camera in the world is useless without good lighting. Get some books or tapes on technique and actually practice some setups. Challenge yourself to add one new (but appropriate) twist to the things you shoot already, each new production.

Since none of your training is formal, I think you would find some good value in skimming a used college level TV textbook from Amazon or the like. Zettl is a perennial favorite. Also check out the web site for Michael Weise Productions, he’s got books there on direction and camea technique that really break it down for you, show you how the pros do it. “Cinematic Motion” I think is one of the better ones I read.

You might look into what your local community college or learning Annex offers in the way of film appreciation courses… learn to look for what really makes a film effective, then look for ways to bring the same concepts to your own work. I know sometimes it’s a stretch to find links between John Ford and your next powerpoint-to-tape lecture, but you know….. After I read a little on Joe Campbell and the power of myth and that stuff, I was able, in an abstract sense, to apply “The Hero’s Journey” ideas to things as short as 30-second Tv and radio spots, and to very prosaic, longer training type pieces – and darn if they didn’t improve. You just need to get your head around the new concept and enhance your perspective a bit. Read the Cow articles on creative burnout and how to revitalize your muse, they will help.

Finally, there are an awful lot of tutorial links here on the cow that can give you ideas for how to improve many aspects of your look.

The fact you’re asking these questions says to me you have the right attitude about what you’re doing. Best of luck to ya.

[Mark Suszko]

This is a situation made for Auto-trace white. Some cameras implement it better than others, being more “shockless” about the changes.

[Mark Suszko]

Ask this again in the Live & Stage Events forum, they have lots of experirnce in doing this on purpose-designed equipment.

[Mark Suszko]

The most awesome app i’ve seen for this is called “Schedu-All”.
Oprah and the BBC use it.

It consists of various modules, so you can buy the functionality you actually will use, a la carte.

It has the ability to not only track every tape and shot you have, but also to schedule all the staff, shooting gear, post rooms and individual pieces of gear, from client sessions to maintenance schedules, etc etc.

It is ruinously expensive if you buy the whole kit and caboodle, but it could be worth it anyway.

[Mark Suszko]

Google will turn up more, but I can think of

Emmy
Gold Lion
Hugo
Telly
Aurora
Golden Reel (former ITVA, now MCIA, dunno if they still do awards).

The Emmy needs no qualification or explanation, the Gold Lion is an ad award, IIRC.

The Telly and Aurora are part of the new trend in awards where you pay a smaller fee to enter, but if you win, you pay a larger second fee to actually get the plaque or trophy (otherwise you just get a certificate). Emmy’s and those kinds of comps have entry fees up in the several hundreds per spot entered, but the trophy is free. I could never afford that on my own, and my bosses don’t pay entry fees.

For many people in the business, these newer, low-entry-fee types of awards have much less prestige than an Emmy, and are considered “fake”. I have won several of those Tellys and the like for myself and clients, I don’t consider them “fake”, but they are judged a little differently, some would say, judged more “sympathetically”. I’ve entered I think 4 times and won 3, a mix of 1st and 2nd place. If they were fake, I would think I’d have “won” all 4. So you can’t just “buy” the awards like some people claim, you still have to meet *some* standard of quality and professionalism. the longer those awards exist, the more weight and esteem they will tend to build up over time, as long as they keep things honest.

The organizers of those awards, (where the entries are closer to 50 bucks than 500) take pains to explain that like projects at similar budget levels are judged against other like projects, so your 100-dollar budget corporate project need not compete against a new 50-thousand-dollar Boeing Aviation demo for NASA. OTOH, the winner lists for those “fake” awards are full of entries for many prestigious companies like Boeing and orgs like NASA so *somebody* thinks they are worth it. Lots of Fortune 500 companies are on the winner lists for the Telly every year, either for their internal video ops or by the production company serving the contract.

My take on it is, these awards are all thought of as equally impressive by people outside the business, “civilians”, if you would. They make impressive props to keep in the lobby and on the desk when you are trying to sell your competence to a new client. Between experienced pros IMO, pretty much the Emmy is the only one to try and brag about, maybe the Lion, because they are so much more exclusive and tough to win. And yet, there are apparently many real pros out there that don’t have Emmys even though their work more than qualifies, they just don’t keep personal score on their careers thru awards, and never enter the competitions.

I got on the awards train early in my career because I was looking for professional validation I wasn’t getting from my peers or bosses. The old boss never liked us entering awards comps unless it was a group entry, because he felt it was bad for morale. Group entries are a lie, why should I share the award with five people who never had anything to do with the work, when it was honestly all my labor? Besides that, it makes it hard to detail on a resume that you earned the award when it has a group name on it. Well, that was my attitude in the 80s. I’m a “tad” more diplomatic now. Nowadays, when I think a project’s really good, I may suggest the client enter for the appropriate award, when they win one, they look like heroes to their bosses, and then I own them, great for repeat business;-)

I think really it (the boss’s non-support for entering) was more because as I started racking up the plaques, he thought I was going to use the new validation of my talent to hit him up for raises he couldn’t pay. He didn’t “get” that the awards were IN LIEU OF more pay. I entered some awards comps sponsored by Women in Communications, and I was bringing home first-place and second-place stuff in multiples every year for a while, until I couldn’t afford any more entry fees and the invitations from the comp sorta stopped coming in the mail, maybe they wanted to give some other local people a chance;-) Times change, after a while, I stopped entering any comps, partly for the fees, mostly because the kinds of projects I was being assigned were just not entry-worthy material any more. (“And the award for best taping of a 90-minute powerpoint slide show with voiceover goes to…”) ;-P

Recognition’s good as cash sometimes: frankly my pay stinks, but low pay can be made up for in other ways, and recognition like this is one of those ways. It gives me pride and confidence, and spurs me to better efforts. I’m one of those people that will kill themselves working hard, just to hear something complimentary about the effort, when it’s truly deserved. My workplace has been traditionally stingy about such things. Always has. Unfortunate.

For other people, the work itself is reward enough, I can respect that, and sometimes I feel that way about a project myself. I look at some of the movies Marty has NOT won an Oscar for, and they are films that will become monuments of their own, lasting in the public consciousness long after the metal statuette would have tarnished.

Anyhow, I say go for any of the awards you can afford to enter, there are no real negatives to it that I can see, and you can quit doing it any time you want. Looks nice on a resume or company brochure, gives you something to show clients or Mom, makes you feel good about what you’re doing.

[Mark Suszko]

I hear lots of folks buy Scenalyzer for thirty bucks and use it for a time lapse program on their windows laptops. On the mac side, you could look at Boinx software’s istopmotion, which could be set up to look at your realtime stream and sample out appropriate time lapse grabs from it. BTV is also popular on the low end (cost wise). If you have the latest mac OS and any programming skill you might look into making a special mini-application with their new funtionality… basically it would mostly be a Chron script, it seems to me…

[Mark Suszko]

I have a freer hand on projects where the clients are not entirely sure what they want, or if the script is pretty loose. Then I unleash my full creative force on it.

OTOH, if they come in with a paid-for script and time coded selects, it’s time to be a team player. That doesn;t mean you don;t point out things that are bad or wrong or that could be improved, just that you don’y insist on any of that, you offer, they either take it or they don’t and you press on.

In a few cases where I felt really strongly about something, I made a separate sub-timeline with the alternate version, then showed it during a lunch break or something like that. Sometimes they go for it, other times they’ve made up their minds and you’re not going to change them. Then you go home and kick the dog.