Working! (a bit)
Me, that is.
This state has been forced upon be by dual evils - boredom and lack of money. Unfortunately I haven't got a job yet though. So what am I talking about, you may ask? Read on, dear reader, read on.....
Ahem. Apologies for the above prose but I've been sitting alone in an office in Ladbroke Grove since about 10:20 this morning and I'm going to be here till 8 or 9 tonight and I think the caffeine may be getting to me.
So what's going on? What am I drivelling about? Well....
I am still pretty much unemployed since finishing my degree. As you'll probably know I want to make a career in TV and have plenty of experience in this area (an A4 page and a half's worth on my CV taking the highlights). However, nobody seems to want to employ me; this may be due to the fact that I now believe my first CV was a bit crap so I re-did it and, owing to various arse getting to the Uni careers office, this new version has been in service for a week or so. So I'm hoping for better luck now, and to be honest with the current money situation (living off rapidly diminishing savings) I'll need it. Fortunately my rent's cheap and the landlord easy-going; I can move out when I want to, I just don't want to.
So.... fortunately I am mates with and share a flat with a guy who works in TV post (read: editing). He's going up in the world and is thus getting offers of work, usually through contacts, that he doesn't want. So he's thrown my contact to some of these people, knowing that I know what I'm doing.
To summarise - I've now been contacted by a couple of places who needed edit dogsbodying done in a hurry on a short-term basis.
Tuesday night I went to a post place (read: editing facility) in Clapham Junction to digitise (i.e. copy from a tape into a computer) some rushes (i.e. unprocessed footage from cameras) for a DVD for the government about electronics in schools. This was because they had 72 hours of the damn things and there was no way they could get it all done for the project deadline (the end of the month).
Digitising is not the most exciting thing in the world; it pretty much involves putting a few timecodes into the computer and then leaving it alone for an hour or so while it does stuff, glancing at it every now and then to make sure it's still working. OK it's a bit more complex than that but it's not creative or anything. I was working on two suites (FCP running on Mac G4s with OS-X if you're interested) which made it a bit more interesting as they would not always work properly (though neither crashed or anything like that). However, they did have a very fast internet connection (they host websites from a stack of computers behind where I was sitting) and a PS/2 with I-Toy (this is very cool. I'm not going to go on about it here but I really enjoyed it - maybe this was because it was 4am and I was short on sleep - meh) along with satellite TV and I brought some books, tapes and CDs with me.
The money's good though - I got £10/hour and 'worked' from 6pm to 7am. It was an odd experience to go home through the morning rush hour and collapse into bed at 9:20am (I had to ask someone on the tube to make sure I was awake at my change).
And today I'm duplicating rushes in Ladbroke Grove for a show about adverts (looks like a bog-standard channel 4 format from what I've seen). This is even easier than diditising, press record and play at the same time and it duplicates. The slightly complex stuff like proc amps, audio channels/levels, timecodes etc. are all set up already. And I'm still getting paid £10/hour! Essentially to sit around and make sure it doesn't f**k up. Unfortunately there's no PS2 or superfast internet here (I'm using the bosses laptop with a Freeserve modem connection) but I do have books, tapes, CDs etc.
And as at the other place I can play with pro-level editing software (all in the name of getting experience). Which is nice.
The best thing is being able to meet people in the industry and (hopefully!) impress them. The guy at the first place said a few times that we must have a proper chat sometime - I take this as a positive sign for future employment.
Whew. So that's my job history so far.... will bloody need some more soon though. Think I'll take a wander of production houses in central London after I get back from a girlfriend visit to Manchester....
laters
|
Current Poll
Links of Me
Extreme Ironing Bureau -
BOFH -
The Onion -
Daily Dilbert -
|
