[Mark Suszko]

MPEG Streamclip is so awesome, I would name my next child after it, but I fear that it will be inoperative in the newest mac OS. The new hotness I understand is called “ff-Works”.

It’s not free, but not expensive, either, and that’s what I’ll probably use when the old dice no longer roll.

[Mark Suszko]

Ty, to answer your question, for me It used to be Synthetik Studio Artist.

[Mark Suszko]

I did wedding work on the side to supplement the income for my growing family, but yes, you get to a point where the time you can spend with the wife and kids becomes more important than the extra income. And I can guarantee you, most people come to that realization much later than they’d have liked, in retrospect. (cue “Cat’s In The Cradle” song here). I also was doing this back at the point where the formats and systems were about to take a huge technology jump, and I had to decide if I wanted to invest in all the new gear and editing technology, to stay competitive and relevant, for what, for me, was only a weekend “pin money” gig, …or cut my losses. I learned some things while doing those weddings, (including building an abiding hate for the Kool and the Gang song: “Celebration” (shudders)…) and was able to apply my existing production skills and knowledge to those gigs to elevate them a bit. But unless I went for the super-high-end work, which my day job didn’t allow time for – I wasn’t going to make enough to offset the loss of quality time.

So your existential crisis is coming in about on schedule. You face the same kinds of issues, just in a different decade.

I’m not going to disparage wedding/event work. Doing it well is an art. There’s a lot of competition from the low end, cut-rate, semi-pro people, who use it as entry-level work, giving it a bad reputation, and there’s a stratospheric level where the budgets and production standards rival a Hollywood production. In the middle are people just doing their best to make a living telling people’s stories, at a price they’re willing to pay. It’s a job where the client has a lot of influence on how the job is done, which can be hard to manage regarding expectations. Yes, the hours are hard in season. OTOH, shooter jobs regardless of genre’ often run to ten-hour days, then paid overtime. You often get to have some creative fun in the editing in this genre’. But it does carry a stigma to the unschooled; don’t try to promote this background too heavily when marketing to businesses/ corporate, because they have some out-of-date prejudices about what qualifies a person to do corporate communications work. Rather, I’d suggest if you plan to chase corporate work, start building a portfolio of example work “on spec”. Make up some training, promo, PSA’s , VNR’s and annual report kinds of examples to show what kinds of “looks” you’re capable of, outside of weddings. In the process of making those, you may find what kind of alternative work flips your switch.

Then concentrate on that.

[Mark Suszko]

I know people in their 50’s doing it. I know people pushing 60 that do it. And more. If your body can keep up, keep at it.

But if you’re looking for something to branch into, forensic work, i.e., videos for the legal profession, could be one way to go. As in all cases, lower equipment costs and new technologies lowered the bar for entry so there’s lots of competition. But the hours are better.

Another growth area would be to specialize into a niche like recording oral history for families and archives. You’ll need to partner with a good interviewer, or learn how to do that yourself, but I can tell you it’s rewarding work, if not very “sexy”. And a growth area, because of aging demographics and a desire to keep family history before memory loss takes it away. It’s a marketing challenge, for sure. But there IS a market there.

Find a local or state government media job covering council meetings, etc. Pay’s low but the work’s steady. Benefits and pensions may be available.

Work in independent journalism, freelance correspondent documentary stuff.

A niche area that might pay well would be 3-d capture and digitization of objects and locations, for architectural and many other purposes. Scanners mounted on drones, on jibs, etc.

Something I’d personally like to get into; projection mapping video in various places. For art installations, concerts, marketing/sales/conventions/sports (ever see projection mapping done on a basketball court?)

To make a career that pays, I give the same advice I’ve been giving for over a decade: find a hyper-specialized niche where there is less competition, and master it. I’ve seen people make a living just doing pro photography and videography of prize livestock. And people that shoot rodeos, beauty pageants, car racing. People that specialize in coverage of vacationers on cruise ships or at resorts. People that just shoot hunting and fishing media. Boat races. Stop motion and time lapses. Fencing matches. Underwater work. Skiing and boarding, of course. Cycling… And all the other activities people do. Maybe, ask yourself, what do you have a passion for, outside of what you do now… and is there a community of those people that can be served with good video? Some of these careers need more than just camera skills or editing skills… they may need producer and writing skills. You may need to retool your skillsets to realize a better career.

Good luck, hope you find something that pays you for your passion.

[Mark Suszko]

What if in addition to the two particle streams firing into each other, with an attract gravity modifier, to bend them into downward arcs, you layer a third stream/emitter that’s the “mixed” version, and you use blending modes coupled with management of the various decay rates, to suggest the mixing?

[Mark Suszko]

Motion VFX will likely have something roughly similar, as a Motion template, which you could then customize. Motion has in it’s built-in content an animate-able timeline or two, which you might look at for reference.

It might also be something you could create in Prezzi… but that’s not what I’d do.

[Mark Suszko]

I think my new retirement plan will be a company that does nothing but update and transcode people’s files to keep them playable in the current tech standards. Seems like job security.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKlmoCzBPdw

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[Mark Suszko]

First-person narrative?

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks for that link. I think her story has a lot to teach us about the business today.

[Mark Suszko]

I did an interactive game show once on DVD that had the “choose your adventure” type branching in it. It had something like six sections, each section started with an introductory scenario, then the host comes on and asks you to make a choice from 4 options. Wrong answers linked straight to an explanation of why that was not the best answer, then looped back to the question menu for another try. At that point you could pick another answer, or dump out to a top menu. Correct answers went to a congratulatory/summation clip, then a new menu with options to go to another question or dump back out to the main menu. It worked pretty well, though the logic map looked like the NY Subway system. It was a very good way to learn Apple’s DVD Studio Pro authoring system. I keep an older mac with that around, just in case we ever want to do this again. Maybe you can do that with Adobe Encore, I haven’t delved into that yet.

I also did a simpler version of this for another project using, of all things, Powerpoint. It was nicknamed the “Advent Calendar”, because it was a cut-away view of a house with rooms and like opening the windows in an Advent calendar to get a daily treat, you could click into any room to get new things to pop up, and they had some interactivity with roll-overs and such. In this case, it was demonstrating energy saving techniques for every room in a home. You could put timers on every page or feature so that if someone walked away from the computer, it would re-set to a starting configuration if left untended for five minutes. I wanted to couple this with a touch screen interface but they limited me to using a mouse so I had to make a vandal-proof kiosk and mouse station for the thing…

At the time, I could not code HTML, but it turns out Powerpoint can convert it’s slide shows and buttons etc. into HTML for you. Complete with go to buttons, returns, menus, etc. I wouldn’t call it *elegant* coding, but it was functional, simple enough to do, and the price was right. If you used good-looking stock or artist-supplied imagery, the results could even be impressive, with text effects, reveals, fancy transitions, sound effects or narration clips playing in synch to the visual features…… (finally an apporpriate reason to USE all those bells and whistles in PPT) It also could link to videos played in the slide show using windows media.

Our other option at the time was for someone to hard-code everything in MacroMedia Director, which was the more elegant way to achieve the same result as the power point hack. But finding someone affordable with the deep knowledge base to author in Director back then was just too big a challenge.

No doubt there are now more modern tools for doing these, but I haven’t needed to do this kind of work in so long, I couldn’t say what’s the ” modern ” option. I know there’s a free web-based tool online to make simple multiple-choice quizzes like this, high school teachers use it… But I would still recommend the PowerPoint approach to at least make a working demo of what you want to do, so people can understand your vision.

Logic map from my interactive quiz training DVD: