If you work in post production, you’ve probably described yourself a number of ways. Curious. Goal-oriented. Driven. Ambitious. And as 2018 approaches, the urge to revisit your goals as a professional naturally rises. There’s not much to back up the usefulness of the idea of New Years resolutions, but we do them anyway. Humans love […]
If you’re anywhere near Hollywood this week, you’ve got a hot take on Harvey Weinstein. I’ve only been here a few years, exclusively “below the line”, and I heard all the rumors too. I dreaded ever having even secondhand contact with the man and his company: a powerful star maker with the ability to squash any […]
Whether by necessity or the evolution of a specific kind of culture, internships have emerged as a dominant “foot-in-the-door” for the post production industry. Among those internships, the unpaid variety tend to dominate in a way that is not seen in many other fields such as business and medicine. Sure, unpaid internships aren’t exclusive to […]
Imagine this: you’re in your early twenties, at the start of your career in post production. You come from a working class family with no connections in the media industry, and you’ve had many challenges to overcome along the way. You’ve been working hard to maintain momentum by keeping your bosses happy at your day […]
July 2018 edit: It’s been about a year since I originally wrote this, and it’s sparked endless conversations about paper cuts and microaggressions in the post production industry, and even a session with the Diversity Steering Committee at the Motion Picture Editors Guild last fall. This isn’t a problem that’s going away anytime soon, but […]
Whenever I discuss gender in the film industry, someone usually pops up and says “yeah but it’s waaaay better than it used to be!” And every year, San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film publishes their annual Celluloid Ceiling Report on womens’ employment “below the line” and shows […]
On August 13th, the Blue Collar Post Collective conducted a town hall style panel discussion in Hollywood on the state of mental health in post production. The panel was live streamed on YouTube, and the archive is available to watch. Mental health is a very important topic, but we don’t focus on this discussion much […]
Last week, a young woman on Twitter told me she had read an old blog post I wrote and immediately related to it and needed more information. The post, titled “Professional Fears”, was published on February 5, 2010. As a recent graduate, she told me she was being held up with exactly what I wrote […]
If a thing happens and nobody writes about it, did it really happen? Of course the answer is no, which is why I’m writing a post about a project I finished editing in September. But there is some freshness to it: it’s actually airing nationally(ish) this week. You could have seen it online this whole […]
Sometimes sexism is exactly what you think it is. So picture this: last day of NAB 2014. I’m wandering around killing time before I needed to head to the airport. I have a horrible cold. I am over it. I sit down at Quantel’s booth (on squishy red squares) where a sharply dressed woman who […]