[Mark Suszko]

I’m a big fan of a Liberal Arts education, where you learn HOW to learn, while you learn what you learn. It makes you adaptable when one specialty gets overrun or dries up, and lets you grow into new areas of specialty as they emerge.

Not that people can’t be successful going thru a tech school, however I would say the biggest successes that come out of tech schools also filled in the gaps in their own knowledge and experience with non-stop active self-exploration outside of the narrow tech curriculum. They were not content to stop at the place in the book where their teachers stopped.

You say to me: “But as an editor, I really don’t see what studying (xyz course) has to do with me making a living. It’s nice, but it’s fluff, a luxury. Gimme business courses.”
Nothing wrong with taking business courses, I recommend them if you ever want to work for yourself.

I’ve worked with people who learned just the bare, narrow, technical minimums of their immediate time period, and I was constantly having to clean up their work behind them when they misspelled chyrons because they were unfamiliar with terms, or made other glaring errors due to a lack of general knowledge. And as time went on, their tech skills struggled to keep up because while they had learned what button to push in what sequence to get a certain result, they understood little of what was BEHIND those buttons and wires, HOW and WHY they did what they did. And when the buttons changed, or new buttons came in, or a new result from the old buttons was desired, somene else had to re-train them in how to deal with this.

In the editing suite, when writing and directing, I have drawn on multiple disciplines like art history, sociology, politics, physics, music, literature, English composition, and more. If you look at it the right way, EVERYTHING feeds into making you a complete human being, and it is the variety of those skills and the mix of ways you apply them to the work, that make you a more effective video producer.

Not that I’m an expert in everything, but it certainly is helpful to be able to describe what you want musically as something like Aaron Copeland, if you need woodwinds or brass, That you want a 6/8 or a driving 4/4, or to explain to the client that you are using the rule of thirds or the golden proportion in this composition, or that the composition of a particular shot is deliberately evocative of so-and-so-‘s painting, or that for the lighting of a shot you want the wrap-around feeling of a Vermeer, or why this color is a bad choice because it’s not across from a complement on the color wheel and moreover, in the culture of the client paying for this work, that color has a bad subtext to it… Or why a dissolve is used one way and not another, based on the history of film.

It’s hard to manipulate or convey structures and concepts if you can’t communicate them. A Liberal Arts background is a fine base to work from in getting this “life vocabulary”. It is not the only path, certainly there are other ways as valid, for some people. But I like this method for being so open-ended. Formally or informally, never stop learning, for the day you stop is the day you start to die.

[Mark Suszko]

My guess is it’s going to be hard to find a place that will pay you to learn AE when they can drop a free ad in Craigslist and get fifty AE trained guys a-runnin’, with demo reels ready to show.
That is, if your bosses *know* about the availability of such resources:-)

You can sign up for AE classes at some local place and use the student academic discount to buy a half-price copy of AE for home use or buy some training DVD’s and work the examples and tutorials at your own pace at home on the DL. Concentrate on creating large workspaces that can span several monitors or projections, in the same way you do slides now. Then spring your new skills on the boss at a convenient moment. Don’t advertise your new skill until you have actually GOT some skill to show, but for what it’s worth, I think you are on the right track. If you could find an internship at a graphics house that would be great, that’s not likely, so in your situation it might be as well to just be auto-didactic and homeschool yourself for the moment.

[Mark Suszko]

I am lucky in that I usually also direct and shoot what I edit, so I am always thinking up coverage and alternative angles and whatnot. I can look honetsly at what’s being shot and know what I will be doing with the footage as the editor, and what I might need later for coverage.

In my projects I only occasionally get to use “real” actors. Real actors can deliver with consistency, and this lets you do things like run thru a scene more than one time for wide and tight shots, single-camera, and everything will tend to cut together pretty well because the actors are doing everything the same for each take. It’s part of their skills most people don’t appreciate. Late at night after editing for hours, it is so wonderful to be able to cut between five different takes and notice the little bit of business with the drink glass or cigarette or posture or position or whatever is exactly right in each one.

But when I have to do a 2 or 3-person scene using non-pros, I tend to shoot it with two cameras, one for wide coverage and one for singles, because no single take of the scene will play exactly the same way each time. The second camera seems like an extravagance at times for these kinds of simple projects, but it’s the only way to make sure I have the matching coverage and cut-aways I need later. It costs a little more up front but absolutely saves time in the edit later, plus it delivers a better overall quality.

When the shooting situation allows, I can also sometimes break the second camera free to go set up in advance for another scene nearby, then my non-pro “actor” can walk into the next scene and we’re ready to go without that ‘cooling off’ downtime of setup that leads to the actor getting stale and forgetting their emotional states.

[Mark Suszko]

First, tell the English department at Sequoias that you need a refund because you end your sentences with prepositions.:-)

There are paid and unpaid internships. Usually unpaids at least give you academic credit at the college or university that runs the internship program. Univerities tend to have the plum intern programs, with TV stations, advertising agencies, Public relations companies, major corporations that have video departments… you can see that there can be more video opportunities than you’d at first have guessed, from the internal com department at Lockheed to the in-house promo or training department of an ad company or food service corporation.

TV news stations and cable companies use a LOT of interns. There was a case a few years back in California where a producer intern took a station to court because it turned into basically a sharecropping/slavery kind of thing. No training, no pay, long hours and no expenses covered. And it is not supposed to be like that. You are both getting and giving something: they get cheap labor and fresh ideas and views, you get valuable training, hands-on experience and networking contacts. It would be interesting to find out how the lawsuits came out.

Some trade schools or vocational schools also have internship programs. In California, you should be able to find hundreds of programs, but then again, it’s California, where every guy behind the counter at McDonald’s has a script he wants to show you, and every waitress is also an actress. You have more opportunity in that state but also a LOT more competition for the openings. If you are a real go-getter, you might find a company that doesn’t have or use interns yet, much less an in-house media department, and offer to pioneer the program for them. This may turn into an excellent job opportunity later.

Super-short version of my college intern experience: we were based in Chicago, my classmates all got their internship assignments ahead of me, working for the big O&O ABC, NBC, CBS stations, and for ad agency giant J. Walter Thompson. I wound up with a tiny cable outfit in the ‘burbs a short drive from home for the summer. End of the internship, we get together to compare notes. The kids from the big TV stations had no hands-on with actual gear due to union rules. They did light office work, phones, and could make a damnfine cappachino. They also had nice letters of recommendation and help getting interviews from people like Bill Kurtis, but once in the interview, they had nothing much to show.

Came my turn to describe my experience at the non-glamorous fleabag suburban cable place (Continental Cablevision of Elmhurst):

“I was the segment producer on a daily half-hour talk show: I produced the entire Wednesday show each week. I found, booked, and pre-interviewed guests, wrote scripts and copy, field-produced and directed with a 3-man ENG crew and sometimes the multicam production van: I shot and edited videotape, I wrote and reported stand-up news segments in the field. On air days I sat next to the director and kept time and fed in chyrons or floor directed. I’m qualified on three different editing systems, three kinds of cameras, the Grass 100 switcher, the VP-2 Chyron, I can splice audio tape, I know how to operate every piece of gear in the place except the satellite dishes for the Head End. I have a demo reel here on umatic and VHS of nine shows I produced and several VSOT news pieces I made for those episodes. And I can’t even SPELL cappa, ugh, cuppo, ugh, whatever. Is that some kind of coffee?”

Of our class, only myself and one other student intern I knew of got industry jobs, it was on the strength of what skills we were able to achieve during those few weeks as interns. A fancy letter of introduction only gets you a meeting with the people that hire… but you have to bring them more than just a willingness to work and a great personality. You get out of an internship, and your college instruction in general, only as much as you put *into* it. And you can find great opportunities in out of the way places, or CREATE the opportunity if you have that kind of drive.

And I neither drink nor spell cappa-whatsis. Do you really think a guy like me needs MORE caffeine?!?!:-)

P.S. Paula Jolene Smith; thanks wherever you are for the fine and patient training you gave the Loyola Interns all those years ago. You taught me not ALL directors need 4-letter words to get the job done. 20-plus yers later, I’m still making a living doing this!

[Mark Suszko]

I found it highly ironic a large pro video facility was robbed and had no security cameras watching things. You often see that “shoemaker’s kids run barefoot” thing happening in the biz.

Steve, I like that you are setting yourself written rules and priorities. I agree with a lot of the principles there. IMO it’s a little stronger than I would have gone, but then again this event didn’t happen to me and I don’t pretend to know your intimate business situation.

Banning all clients from the home office is understandable after your event, and probably smart if you can swing having a formal office space for the paying customers. I don’t know that the higher-end customer base you’re now targeting will react well to a “black box” approach, but if you still work on giving them the feeling of being “hands-on”, with you being very responsive, maybe they won’t care where they get it done so long as you GET it done right. In the eighties you just weren’t a happening concern if you didn’t have a hip and highly decorated “creative space” for the clients to visit and feel special in. These days the “lean and hungry” aspect is up front – what decor your suites have and the quality of the client snack trays takes a back seat to results.

Let me make one other suggestion about clients to pursue: why not be your own client once in a while? What I mean is, consider using your home office base of operations as the center for your own self-financed projects. A documentary, or a theatrical short, whatever creative project you’ve always had an idea to do in the back of your head. Do a Roger Corman (in the financial sense) and cobble together some financing and start shooting that dream project on the side. Don’t wait for retirement, you may wake up dead next week and hate that you never got it done when you had a chance.

That project is also going to benefit from your enhanced empathy and all the emotional and intellectual ferment going on in your head right now. You are like a charged-up battery right now and you don’t know it: unleash that force on your dream project, see if I’m not right and that you’ll be amazed how much you accomplish in a short time with it.

I do my best and fastest writing when I am spitting mad. Use that energy. Tap into your muse.

[Mark Suszko]

BTW, $100 IMO buys a pretty crummy tripod, but $25-$50 RENTS you an AWESOME one. Build the cost into your billing, plus a markup, and work your way towards a purchase. Tripods are one of the better video investments: last forever, good resale. I’d buy my own tripod, lights, and mics before I bought a camera. Rentals typically start out at ten percent of the full price of purchase, so you don’t want to rent the tripod more than ten times, or you get “upside-down” on the ROI but then again, if you are billing right, you won’t need to rent it more than a few times. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Well at the very least a deal memo. You must have it on paper, no question.

Also you should know that actors, authors, celebrities of whatever stripe, don’t always have the final say on a deal they agree to. I remember writing Isaac Asimov in my college days to ask him for his blessing on a project to produce a radio serialization of his Foundation Trilogy on my college radio station. He wrote me back to say he loved the idea, but that everything was up to his publishers, Doubleday. From whom I could never get the time of day, of course. While your contacts may be all for your idea, chances are their lawyers and agents will have to be involved, so best to get with them sooner rather than later.

You didn’t make it very clear if you are seeking content contributions from these people, a financial investment, or both. I would caution you that I feel asking the same person for both a financial investment in the project and a creative contribution at the same time is the ticket to a world of hurt. Don’t do it. At worst, let them ask other people for money, but if they are int he program, don’t ask them to also bankroll it. That’s my two cents.

As to how much they should get back from being in the thing, those deals range all over the map. Some big name actors will do a gig for free or for scale, just because they like the part and don’t care about the money because they are already rich. Some will agree to defer their payment until after the project has reached some milestone, this usually also involves giving them a percentage off the gross, aka “points off the gross”. Or a marketing deal, where they get the profits from any toys, t-shirts, sundtrack albums, whatever, that spin off the main project. This is what made Lucas really rich from the first Star Wars; Fox basically gave the merchandising rights away to him, not knowing what they had. So more of the money from the toys goes to George.

The important constant in all those deals is, everything must be spelled out in writing in advance.

[Mark Suszko]

You should expect to pay as much for a good fluid-head tripod as you did for that camera, more even. And that’s cheap actually, considering it will last you longer than the next three cameras you own, and make the shots lok like they were from a more expensive camera. A crummy head means crummy shots, so don’t cripple yourself right at the start of the race. If you don’t have much money, find a quality used one. B&H is often used as a guide to new and used pricing. There are others. I prefer to buy a slightly over-rated tripod and head, one that can take a good bit more weight than just the camera. One reason is that eventually you DO end up putting more weight on it. Like buying clothes slightly larger than your size, knowing they’ll shrink a little and (if you keep eating those donuts while editing) you’ll expand a little, and everything will meet comfortably somewhere around the middle. An undersized tripod and hed will always be spindly, wobbly, and tippy in the wind. AKA useless.

The cheap man always pays twice.

[Mark Suszko]

Read the watt-hours capacity off the battery, it is almost always printed on there somewhere, else it’s in the manual. Read the watts pulled by the camera in the back of the manual. The math is then simple.

[Mark Suszko]

One of the perks of the sheer variety of work I do is I get to peek in on many other people’s specialties. I have worked on video programs about domestic violence and abuse before, and listened to the experts talk, so I’m going to put on my fake Doctor Phil bald pate wig here and tell you, man, this narrative had deja vu written all over it.

Guy sounds like a classic wife beater, if the original post is accurate, and I fear for the other colleague’s safety. Spouse abusers and pimps alike alternate in their behavior between aggression, then apology, excuses (the racial thing is just an excuse) and bargaining and sweet-talk and gifts, until they again reach a triggering event and escalate the violence again. The cycle only accellerates with each revolution. That you are a man makes no difference in his behavior cycle. It is about asserting control thru intimidation and violence.

He got you suckered in initially because you were in a financially weak position and it compromised your boundaries and maybe judgement. He might have sensed that, but unless you’re a really good poker player, again, there’s not much you could have done differently at the outset. The abusers never begin a cycle with a new person on the violent side: they always start on the “Romeo” side. And that nice guy side may last for a good long time at first. It’s only later that they morph into the monster, after getting some hooks into you. Sometimes the abuser is not really conscious of the cyclic behavior, they suppress the knowledge they are doing this, they have themselves convinced they are merely reacting to external, provocative stimuli. Others DO know exactly what they are doing, they are the more sadistic types. And if you’re not an initially suspicious person by nature, it is not anyone’s fault you didn’t see into his soul in the first five minutes and recognize he was evil. So don’t blame yourself. HE’s the whackjob.

You should have filed a police report the same hour after this happened. Even if nothing resulted immediately from that, it would begin to establish a documented pattern of this guy’s behavior. That can only benefit you later, should you file a tort or whatever.

Second, break off all contact with this person and do not respond to any further overtures or communications from this person in any way. You have to interrupt the cycle, not feed or enable him. Any outstanding contractual obligations should be conducted thru an intermediary, like a lawyer.

I am undecided as to the utility of blackballing the person, only because it could trigger more violence against you when he finds out it came from you, and that striking back in that manner is to an extent enabling the guy, giving him more contact to feed off of. Like Internet trolls, they get off on the continued dialog, even if it’s just trading insults. The way to starve them is to not play along. This guy sounds like he’ll burn thru all the local vendors soon enough without your help. You may in fact have already been the last guy in town that would work with him. So, my feeling is, ok to pursue police/court action regarding the assault, particularly if he re-contacts you, because the system will be the intermediary there, but let everything else go.

You probably will be reliving these events for a while, and armchair-quarterbacking yourself on what else you could have or should have or didn’t do. These are normal feelings and reactions to have after such an assault. And you WERE assaulted. Heck, you were battered, too, to be technical about it: assault is the threat to commit the battery upon you. So you’re going to make yourself upset for a while replaying everything in your head and judging yourself, and that’s normal, but not helpful. Don’t let yourself obscess on it. Do share your feelings with trusted confidants, get it a little off your chest, write it down and process it, so you can think clearly and start to put some emotional distance on it. Only then can you act like a smart businessman regarding the situation, and what if anything you’d do different with other clients from now on. Perhaps having a neutral place to meet off-site is a good thing for certain situations.

You may find that actively going out and doing something positive and charitable for someone else after something like this helps take the feeling of helplessness and anger down a peg. Your empathy is going to be heightened for a while, might as well put it to positive, healing use. You don’t have to build an orphanage or anything, but just be open to doing nice little spontaneous daily mitzvas for people here and there: hold a door open, plug someone’s parking meter for them, that kind of thing. Fight hate with love. Done any pro-bono’s lately?

I don’t know that what you told the guy about how his behavior may change your race perceptions was just for his benefit, in the heat of conflict, or if it really reflected your feelings at the time, but I would suggest that now, in the cool light of reason, you know in your heart this is not really the case; that this kind of violence and abuse really is independent of any race or class or even gender, it’s just aberrant human behavior. The fact he used those terms on you doesn’t make him right and you wrong. He used words on you as a tool and a weapon to manipulate you and he tried to pick something that would get under your skin, so to speak. If you are comfortable with who you are and what you believe, you will know what is true about yourself and what is merely a provocation designed to elicit an emotional response. So please, don’t let that fester, and don’t let one aberrant guy volunteer to represent an entire people.

Sorry there wasn’t more marketing-specific help in my post, but what you had was not really a marketing or business problem, IMO. Except in the sense that, when you’re hungry, the temptation to drop your guard and take bigger risks is always there. And there are predators out there looking to capitalize on that. At such times, it’s good to call a time out, check your head here with us, or any friend or other colleague. Their detachment and distance form the situation can prove most valuable. Maybe at some apropriate time, writing yourself a little list of rules and keeping it by the phone or somewhere visible could be helpful. Little sayings, aphorisms, hard limits on billing, whatever. Stuff you know and take for granted but may forget you know when some guy is all in your face.

I bid you peace and good fortune, and that you get past this and continue with success. Let us know of any key developments, we’re all pulling for you here, I am sure.