When I get out in front of a large, or even small crowd, I frequently forget what I really want to talk about and start babbling about the brightest thing in my memory. So in the last few years I’ve started writing down the presentation I should make in case I don’t actually end up there. I hope what I say this afternoon will be somewhat close to this, but if not this is what I meant to say.
Usually I enjoy making up the reel every year, but not always. In past years it’s sometimes gotten in the way of the immediate and pressing. It can feel like a nagging burden to have to go back to it again and again until it’s done, and it can drag on for weeks. Last year I finished only two days before the showing instead of my usual two weeks. I hadn’t even reviewed it so I watched cringing in my seat, looking for spelling error, when it played the first time. Maybe we’ll even find a few today.
One of the past ironies of putting together this compilation was the fact that I had to have the final order of clips all lined up weeks before the show in order to have time to send that information to the printer and have a program printed up. That was a real pain and always ended up causing more problems, at least for me, since alumns are frequently busy and often send in their submissions late, way too late. Finally we all said “forget about it” and life got easier. I always thought it was a good example of old and new media, but my ability to print out 6 full color 11”x17” posters in 4 minutes at the duplications office in the library today modifies that truism somewhat. It’s not the media itself that’s dated, it’s our methods that calcify and need revisiting frequently.
This year I started the process the latest ever and as I write this I’m still not done - one more clip to drop in and several people I don’t have full information about. But this year it was really, really different. I did most all of it in two hours. I was shocked. It’s because 90% of the submissions were QuickTime files on a data disk. All I had to do was pull them off each disk onto a hard drive, sort, drop them in the timeline, add credits, adjust the audio and wow, I’m done.
After all the years I’ve been working in a digital format this was the first time I’ve actually felt such a remarkable advantage to the workflow. It’s saved me tons of time and effort. I don’t know why it’s taken such a long time to make this much of an impact, but it’s a major sea-change in workflow for me. For anyone in business this kind of workflow is obviously less expensive in both time and equipment and so I can fairly say, again for a variety of reasons – tape is dead.
Now it’s true I still had some problems with different formats and a little crunching of one file into another to get it to play, but it sure beats trying to find 90 seconds out of a 40 minute film shuttling the tape back and forth looking, looking, looking - ouch. Now alumns have already selected the in and out points they want, exported just that much from their sequence time-line as a ProRes file, burned it to a disk, and mailed it in.
But wait, there’s more. File sharing. A good number of people (5%) also posted their work to an on-line server and I just downloaded the file to my desktop. What could be easier? Oops, hey the file doesn’t play. Ah, that’s because it’s in some strange format that I don’t have a plug-in for. Ken, can you send another file type? Marvelous. The drawback here is that it often takes up to an hour to download a file using ftp. Then, I have to burn a disk to have a backup copy. Digital - the one hand gives and the zero hand takes away.
But there’s something else that’s different this year and I don’t know why. The submissions are mostly from much older alumns. That’s odd. The newly graduated are often the most prolific in their submissions, sometimes even offering up two or three clips. So where are they?
Then there’s another oddity. I dropped someone this year. Someone I actually like a lot, but the clip was offensive to me and I didn’t think it was appropriate, certainly not for a family event. I’ll put it back in for the west coast version. Sometimes an alumn pops a film in the reel just to get it seen by people and talked about. I think maybe that’s what this was, more of a “spec reel” than a finished work – still looking for another $600,000 and a name to attach, but want to see how much violence there could be? Ah, sorry, not right now, thanks. Maybe later. Nice bloody gunshot effect though, chromakeyed over an animated background set. Interesting.
It’s true that not everyone submits a clip each year. In fact, a lot of successful alumns never submit anything. This is the first time in about 10 years that Matt Danowski sent us a clip. He’s one of the senior editors at 60 Minutes and has only once sent us any of that work. He does jaw dropping stories, but never thinks it’s a Hampshire thing to send them in. This year is no exception. His clip is a nice little art thing, fun, short and friendly. Thanks for that.
Following him in the reel is a fellow student, Dan Epstein whose work all of you have seen over and over, only you don’t know it. He’s one of the classic invisible people working behind the scenes. If a film crew misses their plane or drives off the road in Poughkeepsie he’s the guy that fills in with his crew and equipment. He’s shot everything there is to shoot in New York City. His too is a lighthearted clip shot with his iPhone, not at all his usual commercial work.
On the other side there are alumns (5%) who send in a whole film or episode on a DVD and lightly say, “pick what ever you want” or, “use the part just before the end.” Those are the hard ones. I have to shake myself and keep saying, “don’t watch the film, look for a clip”. Then I realize I’m at the end, having been sucked into the story, but didn’t get around to finding 90 seconds to use. Why don’t we just play 10 minutes of everything and make it easy? Well, that’d be around 4 hours. Oh, I get it.
Then there are the films. Wow. It took this long to even mention the films. I don’t always like all of them, but it’s really interesting to me to see them over the long arc of time. You can see people work their way up the career ladder as their credits roll by each year. You can also see who continues to work with each other – patterns and names. Producers and directors have it the easiest. They can claim the whole work and submit anything, but actors are only in the shot for a short while and then vanish. Composers always want the dialogue to drop away so we can hear their music. Directors of photography are really just interested in the light - hey, look at the light. It’s all fun and interesting. The work of friends.
In the end the true use of the reel is as a simple device to bring members of the Hampshire family together to meet, to talk, to laugh, yes, to raise money, to be surprised, to be reminded about each other and relish the memories and friendships both long and new.
Well, at least that’s what I wanted to say.
gunther
