[Mark Suszko]

So buy it yourself. I mean, put it on your credit card and buy it: check with a real accountant, but I’m pretty sure you can deduct this off your next year’s income taxes if you itemize, and it always stays at your place of work. Either as a business expense or maybe a health expense (you might be able to put it on your boss’s health plan, that would stick it to him!). Put your own name on it and a serial number, keep records to prove its yours so it comes with you if you leave. Meanwhile, look up some ergonomics advisory sites, you might have other issues like desk and monitor height, that are contributory factors to your discomfort.

Your boss is not very caring about his employees to fight you over a good task chair, when you’re spending so much time in it making him money. have you looked for used ones on Ebay and the like? Many office furniture supply companies have sales to clear out blems, scratch-and-dents or used/repo’d furniture, perhaps you can score a deal there…

One other way to go might be to skip a chair altogether, edit standing up, like Walter Murch does. This may not be possible if the desks/cabinetry and etc. are locked into a sitting setup. I knew one other guy besides Murch that edited standing up, but that was because they had literally no room to sit down: the editing gear was all put into a standing rack along with decks and routers, and the bay was too narrow for anything like a console, so he edited every day, standing up, holding a wacom tablet in the crook of his arm, a stylus int he other, leashed by the wacom’s 4-foot cable to the rack. So I guess you could have it worse?;-)

[Mark Suszko]

Matte. You misspoke. Get over it. We all did, way back when Peter explained the distinction. I don’t get why you’re still trying to say one thing is another.

[Mark Suszko]

For showing stuff to clients, you don’t need an expensive laptop, check out the economical portable DVD players, they look like laptops, but are priced between 200 and 400 bucks. Have their own screens as well as a video-out to hook to client’s TV or a monitor or projector you bring along.

[Mark Suszko]

On corporate gigs, remind yourself (and the peanut gallery people bringing in extraneous requirements) that the only guy you’re taking a change note from is the guy/gal that signs the check. Not the guy who brings the check, the guy who SIGNS the check. THAT is the person that needs to approve things. Tell the kibitzers to take it up with TGTSTC if they suddenly wanna mess with a pre-approved plan.

I’ll never forget one approval meeting I went to: the guy we had to please looked at my work, scripted by a professional, edited I must say with consumate skill by myself, overall, a really good piece of work. He started to lay out a list of the most inane, wrong, and misguided critiques, along the lines of the famous scene from the film ‘Amadaeus’: “too many notes”.

He told the attendees of the meeting he knew all about this kind of thing, having reviewed movies once for the college newspaper.

But he was TGTSTC, and so we made every stupid change. Oddly enough, after reviewing the “director’s cut”done to his specs, he had his secretary call us back a week later to say “go with the one you broght in the first time”.

Apparently, he’d taken “his version” home to show the wife, who promptly described it as, well, you know…;-)

[Mark Suszko]

This is my stock answer to this common question, Darcy. Watch a really good movie with the sound off, and call out the shots out loud as you watch a scene. Watch soaps with the sound off and study the camera setups and the cutting. You will be getting free tutoring in technique by some of the best editors out there.

[Mark Suszko]

“Danger, Will Robinson!!!”

Stock footage places like IPA can get you some remarkable stuff, all pre-cleared. Or you can sometimes fake up things with local community actors and get it done cheaply and without the legal hassles.

Anybody that just takes the commander’s word it’s cleared, without anything on paper, is going to be the fall guy when it goes bad.

[Mark Suszko]

Burn an audio CD of it and listen to it on the drive home. Watch it with the sound off. Do both versions still tell the story adequately, on their own?

[Mark Suszko]

I was always a fan of the “Balans” type chair, the kind where you are semi-kneeling and there is no back at all because the posture it puts you into doesn’t require it. There are many cheap knockoffs of these, usually done in low quality wood, some have casters on the bottom. The real deal is height-adjustable. They do look weird, and are awkward if you need to roll around the suite a lot.

I used to have plenty of back problems, and they all disappeared after I got a new mattress and box spring, super-firm.

[Mark Suszko]

Cheaper still, earlier versions of Poser are free. As are many other 3d programs. Frame Forge looks great, mind you, but not everybody needs the boards so hyper-detailed.

A handy source for pre-made objects, both paid and free, for these kinds of programs is turbosquid.com

[Mark Suszko]

Powerpoint is The Devil. Avoid it entirely if you can. Like gun control, powerpoint users should have to be licensed before they perpetrate their presentations.

Keynote may be more refined, but it’s still a poor substitute for real CG work. Whenever possible, I cut and paste the text from the slides into a real Character Generator and re-compose the graphic to broadcast standards using decent principles of graphic design.

Be aware many Powerpoint slide shows will use broadcast-illegal colors/levels and be too hot on whites or too low on blacks. And the line widths and font choices often will give you fits. If you HAVE to use it as given, I find it helps to add the PPT drop shadows to the text. If you can replace the seriffed fonts with something like Arial, Optima, or the like, readability improves.

Want proof Powerpoint is evil? Google “powerpoint” + “Gettysburg Address”.