Digital Anarchy attended the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit this week. It’s a pro-level gathering that we have attended for three years, since the summit’s inception. I’m usually in contact with photographers about limited topics, like how to choose a chromakey screen or problems installing our software, so it’s refreshing to get a macro view of hot topics in the professional world of photography.
Speaking of ‘macro’, the two main topics of the Summit this year dealt with orphaned works and its related topic of internet image piracy, and competing with low-cost ‘micro’ stock sites (mainly www.istock.com). The topic of stock photography was especially succulent since not 24 hrs earlier, Getty Images and Flickr announced a deal of limited reciprocation.
“Flickr on Tuesday entered a partnership with Getty Images to offer its users a way to potentially make money off their photography. The Yahoo-owned photo-hosting community will be a new resource for Getty, which can now contact Flickr members directly through the site and ask them if they want to share one or more of their images for use in a special Flickr-branded Getty collection. Flickr members interested in getting their images featured in the special Getty gallery will have to simply wait to be contacted. Otherwise, Getty and Flickr are encouraging aspiring photographers to post their content on the Getty-owned iStockphoto, which also happens to have been a hotbed for Flickr photos in the past.”
This announcement played nicely into a push button topic at the MS PP Summit. This was ‘macro’ vs ‘micro’ stock imagery, or how there is a wall coming down — if it’s not already down — between pro and amateur photographers. Brings everyone’s price point down and thus their profits too. If you’re not familiar with the differences between macro stock and micro stock, this exchange on the DP Challenge forum has some good opinions and a comparison.
In my opinion, stock images have always been too expensive. Totally understand that there’s a food chain of folks who need to make money from the sale. But i remember from my print design days how many of the companies i worked for simply couldn’t afford the cost of a stock image for their brochure run. Instead, I’d get the nicely paid task of designing a vector graphic for the cover. Stock images seemed a little elitist although granted, my experience was mostly before the days of multi-tiered pricing for different resolutions. Now that photography is more accessible, as with all other disciplines and mediums, it feels like professionals need to come up with a new set of expectations or, somewhat uncomfortably, not have any at all for awhile.
Along these lines, there was an interesting talk given by a photographer named Leo Lesko. His topic was ‘Let the Pirates Have Their Way’, or how to combat image piracy by turning image grabbing into something positive. He suggested posting some of your good photos for free. Your work may be used illegally by some people, but potential customers will also find your images and contact you about using them commercially. It’s a positive spin on the pitfalls of ‘fair use’ and ties in (for me) to the concept of embracing and exploring new business models and marketing ideas. Here’s a related article by Leo Lesko on the Digital Photo Pro website.
-debbie rich
My favorite job at Digital Anarchy is finding interesting customers to showcase their use of our products. It’s part detective work, part intuition, part fantastic reveal. I always come out of the experience having enjoyed the unique personality and creativity of the person I’ve worked with over the course of a few weeks.
And with that statement… Here are our newest Primatte Chromakey gallery additions: Chris Ruhaak of Heartland Photos & Design (HP&D) and LENNON the Photographer of Los Angeles, CA. Both are very talented, established photographers. Their core businesses have a completely different focus and yet each man has been able to create a studio niche using greenscreen work and Primatte 3.0.
Chris Ruhaak specializes in many traditional kinds of portraiture, from seniors to children to weddings. As seen in the before/after images below, his HP&D studio uses Primatte to spice up the design for real estate business cards.
Among other clientèle, Lennon the Photographer works with Hollywood-based performers. The before/after photos below are of Disney personality Michael Petersen.
Watching visual stories and creative solutions unfold is, to me, an incredible aspect of getting to know the talented people who work with our products. Our online gallery shows more Photoshop than video design because I find its easier to obtain permission to show work from folks who use our Photoshop-related products. Photographers and graphic designers seem to have more flexibility with their clients. Often the photographer is his own boss, as with both of our new Primatte gallery participants, and that means he can call the shots. Broadcast designers and other artists working in TV and film are always willing to participate in the gallery, but in the end they often get bogged down by their HR and legal departments.
Of course, if you are an artist who uses Digital Anarchy products, I’d love to hear from you! You can read and see more by Chris and Lennon by going to the Primatte gallery here:
http://www.digitalanarchy.com/primatte/gallery1.html
-debbie rich
——————-
Digital Anarchy
debbie@digitalanarchy.com
In doing the redesign for our www.digitalanarchy.com website, I found a terrific website for free, distressed fonts. It’s called www.dafont.com, which I love that much more because around the office, we refer to Digital Anarchy as ‘DA’.
Here’s the section I’ve been paying attention to:
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=109
I’m a little embarrassed to write out the name of the distressed font that I used for our ‘f/x tools for revolutionaries’ tagline. It contains a four-letter word that’s not used during company time! We did send the designer $$ for commercial use of his font; support the arts and artists.
-debbie rich
I’ve recently received links to two new ‘gathering places’. The popular Kenstone.net site has posted a new version of their Final Cut Pro forum at www.kenstone.net/discussions/list.php?3. Our company is a big fan of Kenstone.net because they always provide solid and thorough reviews of products (including ours) and they have a terrific archive of helpful articles covering color correction, compression, editing, audio, hardware management, etc. A lot of prominent reviewers have contributed to Kenstone.net over the years.
The other site, www.vfxconnection.com, seems to be sparkly brand new. Looks like a networking site and job connection board for folks in the broadcast and special effects industry. I’ve already noticed a few friendly faces from trade shows as registered users.
-debbie rich
There’s a great thread on the AE List (www.media-motion.tv) about designing data graphics. Some really great links came up (thanks in particular to Rich Young). In truth, I love graphics derived from data. I think it can be truly beautiful to see how some data sets emerge visually. Data Animator 1.0 is just a baby step towards a more full featured set of plugins for really playing with data. Hope to do more with it soon. Some links…
There is the master of infographics, Edward Tufte:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
If you do anything related to designing information graphics, his three books are must reads. They contain some beautiful examples of charts and graphs. If you didn’t think infographics could be beautiful you have not seen these books. One of my regrets with Data Animator 1.0 was that we couldn’t incorporate more of his ideas.
A great site for infographics:
Data Visualization: Modern Approaches has a link to
the Hans Rosling TED Talk and more:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/
From Photoshop product manager John Nack:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/04/adventures_in_i.html
Well, the earth shook a little and in celebration of Memorial Day, we have posted a new version of our www.digitalanarchy.com website. It’s only been two years in planning; the challenges of a small company. Here is a fun design exercise that I would like to share.
I had the opportunity to design all of the banner graphics for our website. For the non-product sections, I wanted to have a little fun, so I conceptualized the Support Section banner by starting with two images. One is a banner graphic that I’ve always liked for the website www.inhouseticketing.com, which is a company that services tickets for many fun events in the Bay Area. The other is a photo of me and my friend Hava wearing our kool kid Digital Anarchy t-shirts after a bike ride last year.
I talked through the concept with our p/t graphic artist, and between the two of us, we came up with this initial design:
Which is cute but a bit unrefined. The t-shirt photo is washed out because it was a quick shot under poor lighting conditions. The vector art that Taylor created is nice enough but it was too derivative for me to feel comfortable using. Back to the drawing board…
What I really liked about this piece was the idea of cute girls wearing our Digital Anarchy t-shirts. So I decided to get a group of ladies together. The result was this, a gathering of lovelies at an arts foundation that I volunteer with. The ladies were invited to keep their t-shirts, which begs a standard ‘all I got’ joke, but we’ll ignore the obvious and move along…
Once in Photoshop, I realized very quickly that I should have been more organized in setting up this photo. If I had brought a blue screen with me, I could have set up the shot for super-easy masking with our chromakey removal tool, Primatte Chromakey. Instead, I wound up doing some painful background removal surgery with Photoshop’s built-in tools. Ah well. After some pixel niggling, the gals are against a black background and ready for compositing into our Support banner.
The website banner is only 70 px high, which meant the head height of the girls was too spread out. That issue was fixed easily in Photoshop, with the result being:
This composition felt lopsided, so I added in another photo of two Anarchist gals, plus a t-shirt image surrounding the text ‘Support Center’ to spice up the left side.
And…we’re done. And launched. Finally! Let me know if you find anything that doesn’t work for you on our site.
-debbie rich
Over the past few months, Digital Anarchy has migrated to using formal Support Forms for each product. (Well, as formal as ‘anarchists’ are going to get, anyways.) There are a few reasons for this.
One, often folks forget to give us important details, like their last name or the name of the DA product they need help with. To date, we support 16 products. If I have to do a search in our database to tie in someone’s first name with an email address, then counter-search that with the product(s) he may own… Well, I’m more likely to tackle the questions that are easier to answer first.
Two, we get a LOT of email every day. When people don’t fill out a proper title for their emailed request, that email will often go to a Spam folder. We check our Spam folders a few times a day, but they are chock full o’love. If your email is simply titled ‘Help!’ or ‘Purchase’ or worse yet, if it doesn’t have a title, that email is going to get lost in the shuffle of 250 other emails marked as **SPAM**.
Similarly, if you fill out our Support Form but don’t choose an item from the ‘CHOOSE YOUR TOPIC’ popup, here is where that request goes along with its similarly titled cousins. The 111 unmarked requests shown above came in between Friday at 7pm and Saturday at 9am, which is a slow period for email, and this was during a holiday weekend. Sadly, junk robots (or whatever they are called) tend to find these forms and fill in gibberish. That clogs our email folders and makes it challenging to find the real questions.
So my plea is: Take the time to fill out our Request Forms. They’re very simple to use, we don’t ask a lot of questions, and being able to respond to those forms helps us (ok, me!) to help you more quickly.
-debbie rich
Something that is interesting about doing our customer support is seeing the purchasing patterns. Each week seems to have a different theme in terms of products that are bought and requests that are sent.
For instance, two weeks ago, the big sellers were 3D Assistants and Psunami Water. It was water, water, water all week long and everyone needed it yesterday, as if they were gasping for liquid. I have a feeling that the two factors working here were a writeup in Layers magazine about 3D Assistants, and a tutorial on the fabulous Digital Media Net by Kevin P McAuliffe.
Kevin has been a friend of Digital Anarchy for awhile and we always enjoy his articles, even when they’re not about us. 
You can read the Psunami tutorials here on Audioproducer.com.
I’m trying to locate the Layers magazine article by Rod Harlan. That’s one of our favorite publications and I know it’s _somewhere_ around the office.
Last week, the purchasing theme was Knoll Light Factory for Photoshop and, once again, our popular 3D Asssitants. Another theme that emerged last week were emails that began with ‘Help! Client in room!’ Those requests always makes me scramble as much as our customers.
-debbie rich
I suppose you shouldn’t start blogging until you RTFM of the blogging editor. lol… so I didn’t realize you needed to actually approve comments to the blog. I thought the whole point was that people got to join in the conversation, regardless of what they had to say.
So now that I’ve RTFM… all those comments are live. duh… Hey, I was busy with NAB prep I didn’t have time to read. sheesh. Thanks to the Anarchist Babe Debbie for pointing out that I had comments and that I needed to approve them. And here I thought the world was just ignoring me. 
Just goes to show that people put a lot of effort into writing manuals and you should read them. Particularly our manuals! They’re pretty good and can be very useful.
Here is something that I love about working at Digital Anarchy. Our customers are everywhere, literally everywhere, and their stories — like their artwork — are amazingly diverse and interesting.
Almost every week I become richer with information about a new place in our world. We hand process (= read) every sales order so we can learn who is buying our products. Today a customer from a country with the acronym ‘CO’ bought a product. To me, CO automatically means the US state of Colorado. Turns out, ‘CO’ also stands for the country of Columbia, which of course I am familiar with, but I had never heard of its sub-location called Bogota, Cundinamarca.
Wound up wikipedia’ing Cundinamarca and I found out geographic area is considered a ‘department’ rather than a state or province. Interesting. I have never heard that term used outside of a business context. Turns out that Cundinamarca is one of the original nine states that formed the confederation of Colombia.
Even more interesting, here’s what wikipedia says about Bogota, a place in Cundinamarca which is alternately referred to as a province, district, capital, and department. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cundinamarca
“The capital of Cundinamarca is Bogotá. This is a special case among Colombian departments, since Bogotá is not legally a part of Cundinamarca, yet it is the only department that has its capital designated by the Constitution (meaning that if the capital was to be ever moved, it would take a constitutional reform to do so, instead of a simple ordinance passed by the Cundinamarca Assembly). Also, in censuses, the populations for Bogotá and Cundinamarca are tabulated separately; otherwise, Cundinamarca’s population would total 9.5 million… Cundinamarca has 15 provinces and the Capital District of Bogotá (Bogotá D.C.), which simultaneously acts as capital of the Republic, capital of the Department and a District (or
Department) in itself.”
And this, folks, is how you learn geography and world politics while doing something completely unrelated. Too bad I didn’t figure this out when I was studying for my 4th grade geography quizzes in front of the TV.
*debbie
Is anyone else completely over schelping out to the desert for a week every April?
I mean, the networking is great and useful, but with everyone having broadband I’m really beginning to doubt that I need to give one on one demos to every attendees for four days. There really has to be a better way of interacting with customers and showing off new products.
I’d love to see some comments on why we should keep going to NAB as an exhibitor. It just seems like there should be ways of reaching more of our customers, and doing it more efficiently than with tradeshows.
There was also some talk at NAB of software as a service… moving all the apps online. While this is an interesting notion for word processors and spreadsheets, I really don’t think it works so well for design applications. Particularly video apps. The issue is that the amount of data we’re dealing with is increasing a lot faster than the bandwidth we have available to upload the stuff. How are you going to edit HD online? Or 4K? (or 5K! jeez…) Same applies to photos… sure, basic iPhoto type stuff _may_ be ripe for online… but even then I’m not sure. Most of the consumer cameras out there are 7-8 megapixels, and while one photo isn’t that big, it’s still pretty easy to generate a GB of shots. If you’re shooting 16mp, RAW files it’s pretty easy to generate 4gb of photos.
Not that it’s impossible to get all this uploaded, but it’s unwieldy. I think moving to online apps is an interesting idea, but for graphics I just don’t see it as being practical. At least, not until bandwidth is increasing as fast as the file sizes.
The folks at fxPHD.com have started a new term. If you’re looking for visual effects training, they have some of the best out there, especially for the higher end stuff.
They are an excellent example of the new type of training available that I think either enhances traditional education or completely replaces it. For computer based artists, I really don’t know that the $25,000/yr schools give you your money’s worth.
So I’m a bit late with the NAB report. Sosumi. 
As an exhibitor it’s a little tough to get around to see all the cool stuff. Actually it’s impossible and I was sick as a dog on top of that, so I really didn’t check out that much stuff. However, based on what I heard, most of the nifty cool things were of the hardware variety.
High Speed cameras… unfortunately I wasn’t able to get over there and check out the camera capturing 30,000 frames/sec, but I heard it was freaking amazing. I want one.
Red Camera… ok, just because you can do 5K… does the world really need it? Someone needs to ask this question. Of course, then again some folks thought we would never need more than 640K of RAM. Who knew?
GridIron Flow... software for managing all of the files created by your other software. Really cool stuff from the guys that make Nucleo Pro. Worth checking out. Although I’m surprised the GridIron employees were not driven insane by the looping animation showing a designer dealing with a client. Cool little piece of animation, but, my god, I was in their booth for 20 minutes and was over it, having been looped through it 5 or 6 times. I can’t imagine 8 hours of it.
Nothing else I heard about really sounded that spectacular… although there were plenty of announcements that were interesting. After 13 years of doing NAB, I’m just grumpy and jaded. However, as noted, I’m exhibitor and don’t get out much.
So the latest news re: Yahoo is that they’re looking for News Corp. to save them from the evil clutches of Microsoft.
Yes, News Corp. The most excellent company that brings you the tabloid New York Post and the other bastion of high minded journalism - Fox news.
So somewhere in their muddled minds, Bill Gates is more evil than Rupert Murdoch. Are you kidding me?
I mean, sure, Bill and Microsoft are evil but they are evil in sort of a benign geeky way. Even Steve Jobs is more evil (evil marketing geniuses trump evil geeks… trust me on it… you don’t want to live in a world where Steve Jobs has 90% market share)
But Rupert. He’s just old school capitalistic evil. Seen the movie ‘There will be blood’? Yeah, that’s the type of capitalism we’re talking about. Old school, nasty, “I don’t care if China kills every last dissident, as long as they let me broadcast a censored version of my Sky satellite channel” evil.
I used to think the name Yahoo was just a catchy, irreverent, and fun company name. But if the kids at Yahoo think Rupert and Fox news are going to ’save’ them from Microsoft… they really are a bunch of yahoos.
As it turns out, yes, they can. But it makes it easier if you don’t say idiotic things like ‘girls can’t do math’.
There’s a great site I just ran into:
http://www.girlsgotech.org/
It’s run by the girl scouts and, obviously, is a tech site aimed at girls. Which personally I think is pretty awesome.
One of the interesting things about being in the software industry is the almost complete lack of woman, outside of the design/PR/sales parts of the industry. A female programmer is as rare as a non-caffeinated programmer. They exist, but you need to look pretty hard for them.
I ran into a Newsweek article awhile back written by a woman engineer. It was one of those moments where you read something and a light bulb goes off that illuminates the inside of your head, both past and present. And most of it makes you feel pretty stupid. One of the main points being math is hard. For pretty much everyone. The main difference between boys and girls is that boys are regularly told they’re supposed to be able to do math, and girls are, far too often, told “girls aren’t good at math” or some variation thereof. When the going gets tough, which it frequently does with all things mathematic (and physics and chemistry and…) guys have motivation built-in from society and girls get an easy cop out, if they want it.
This results in not enough woman engineers and the world is probably considerably worse off for it. Once I started writing this I started poking around the web a bit and found this site:
Which includes a post about Tim Berners-Lee feeling the same way. So apparently I’m in good company.
I’ve met enough women that are fully capable in math and the sciences to dispel any illusion that somehow women can’t handle a little math. This includes being privy to a conversation between a friend of mine (who I consider the smartest person I know, and I know a fair number of smart folks… or, at least, smarter than myself) and a female friend of his as she went over the math and algorithms behind an MRI machine. The stuff she was discussing was far above my limited capabilities, and was quite impressive.
Bottom line… if you are in a position to influence girls before they buy into the barbie-syndrome, please turn them on to math and technology. The tech industry will thank you.
Random thought of the day as we get ready to release our first product for Avid…
I find it odd that the four major companies in our industry all start with an ‘A’. Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Avid. It makes me miss the Discreet name even more. I still think it was an idiotic move to kill the Discreet brand… one of the best brands the industry has ever had and they punt it. Dumb. “Autodesk Entertainment and Media” just rolls off the tongue like a dead moose and invokes the image of legions of corporate AutoCad drones creating PowerPoint presentations that get turned into YouTube videos. mmm…. exciting.
Anyways… moving along before I get kicked out of AutoDesk’s developer program…
Actually that’s enough random thoughts for one day…
So let’s start off with the two basic points of this:
1) School is worth going to, but not necessarily the high priced ones. There is, usually, a lot to be gained from an education that can be difficult (although definitely not impossible as we’ll see) to pick up other ways. The truism “You get out, what you put in” applies to school as much or more than any other endeavor. However, ’school’ can have many meanings.
2) Starting off your career $50,000, $75,000, or more in debt is not a good way to kick things off. It’s difficult to say any education is worth that because there are so many good options for education that AREN’T that expensive.
It’s been an interesting phenomenon at Siggraph of late that the booths for the schools (Gnomon, Academy of Art, Brooks, etc) are bigger than the booths for most of the software companies or studios. This has always struck me as a little odd, until one of the folks I work with told me what the current tuition is at the school he graduated from. It’s pretty astronomical… which I guess explains the booth sizes.
This is not a rant against schools. It’s a rant against spending so much money on your education that you become hopelessly in debt once you get out. Which is a REALLY bad way to start off. And it’s even worse if you get half way through and decide it’s not what you really want to do. It is also a bit of a rant against schools who’s main admission criteria is that the student can get a loan. There are other options besides going to high priced schools and taking on a lot of debt. Don’t listen to the sales pitches the schools give you.
So what to do?
If your parents, rich uncle, or the socialite you provide pool boy services for is sporting you the money… then go for it. If someone else is paying for it, go to whatever school you get the best vibe from or think will really give you an edge (it is rare that a design school will really provide this, you get an edge by providing it yourself… more on this later). Like I said, school is worthwhile. It’s a great way to meet folks, get skills working with teams, get access to a wide range of equipment and disciplines, and find out where the good parties are. You also get access to instructors that are experienced and, sometimes, know what they’re doing and can give you some real world tips in addition to just helping you develop your skills. Staff at most schools varies in quality, but there are usually some instructors that stand out. Find those instructors and take every class they teach.
You do not NEED a school to get all this, but it does make it easier.
What other options are there?
1) You teach yourself, enroll in a less prestigious (and less expensive) school, enroll in an online training school like fxphd.com (really cool guys, great classes) or dvgarage.com (different, but also cool). Also put sites like lynda.com and even youtube.com to good use. youtube has a fair amount of good training material on it from various folks, but you do have to dig through a fair amount of crap. There are also many computer graphics (CG Society), photography(dpreview.com), and other sites out there where you can post your work and get critiques on it and/or help with problems. There are a LOT of good resources out there on the net. Use them.
2) Get an internship or entry level job doing what you want to do. Helps if you find someone to mentor you.
3) Network like crazy (this helps with #2). Join any association or group that is even remotely associated with what you want to do. Go to meetings. Go for drinks afterwards. Meet people.
4) Have enthusiasm for what you’re doing and work your ass off to master the tools you’ll need. Getting stoned and playing Wii Golf is not preparing you for a job in the game industry. Sorry. If you can’t motivate yourself enough to get off the couch, then you’re not pursuing the right career. You should be so into what you’re doing (3D modeling, animation, design, whatever) that people have to pry you away from Maya, Photoshop, your camera, or whatever tool you’re creating with. If this isn’t the case… there’s a problem.
PLEASE NOTE: 2, 3, and 4 are necessary for you to be successful regardless whether you teach yourself or pay $30,000/yr to go to an august university.
Particularly number 4. (with number 3 being almost as important)
Many successful students (and practioners) I run into have number 4 built-in. They love what they’re doing, they’re passionate about it, and because of that, they don’t mind the hard work and long hours that are sometimes necessary to be successful. These are the people schools put in their brochures as examples of what can be achieved at their school. These are also the people that need school the least. When they enter their first class, usually they’re already partially self-taught, have great enthusiasm for the subject matter, and are hard working. Yes, they need their skills polished up and refined… but internships, entry level jobs, and inexpensive public colleges can do that as well as or better than many higher priced private colleges.
Which brings us to getting internships and jobs. This is critical regardless of whether you’re in school or not. Experience matters and the only way to really get that is to go out and work. Completing a school project is worth about 1/10th of being part of a team that completes a real project. And a referral on your resume from the company you work for speaks volumes.
Schools are usually pretty good about assisting you with this. Decent career assistance is one of the things that separates the higher priced schools from the lower ones. This can be a big deal and definitely helps. There is a good deal to be said for this. However, if you are self-motivated you can build up the contacts yourself and get the jobs yourself which is a better way of doing it. How? Networking.
Networking can mean a lot of things, mostly it just means getting out, meeting people, and staying in touch with them. Every profession, and often every sub-sub-category of that profession, will have professional associations, informal meeting groups, internet forums, etc. For gaming, there’s IGDA, for visual effects, Siggraph, for photography, PPA, etc., etc. They usually have monthly meetings, yearly conventions, periodic seminars or events, and other ways of allowing members to get out and meet each other. These events are fun, informative, and usually devolve pretty quickly from conference rooms to bars. Sitting around a bar, drinking beer, talking about your passion (photography, 3D graphics, AI algorithms, whatever) is the best way there is to get a job (and possibly really screwing it up if there’s too many shots of tequila involved .
A large part of getting a job is fitting into the company culture. Yes, skills matter, but your personality matters just as much. If you’ve been hanging out with the same folks periodically they’ll get a feel for your skills (i.e. do you know what you’re talking about or do you just constantly make shit up), a feel for if you’ll fit into their company, and specifically if you’ll fit into a role they recently had open up. Also, most industries are incredible small. Everyone circulates around between a few big companies and a cluster of smaller ones, so everyone knows everyone else. This is important for two reasons. 1) it means that even if the people you’ve met at these events can’t help you get a job directly, they may know of job openings and even pass your resume along. Having someone hand the hiring director your resume along with a small compliment is the BEST way to get plopped on the top of the resume pile. 2) Everyone knowing everyone else, means exactly that. If you burn bridges, it can seriously impact your career. Especially if you do it early in your career. Even if you’re in a situation you think is horrible, just find a way to exit gracefully. If the person you’re working for is a complete fucking nutcase, it’s likely that’s well known too. The fact you had enough sense to get the hell out will probably work for you.
So.
If you’re self-motivated there are ways to get into your industry of choice without school. Not everyone is totally self-motivated and in many cases some folks want to try out a variety of different things before finally deciding on a career direction. This is a fine and valid point, and something that going to school truly allows you to do. Again, there’s ways to do this without going to school, but schools provide a great structure and environment to do this kind of experimentation. It also allows you to collaborate with students in other disciplines which can be very cool and enlightening.
One of the things I really got out of going to a 4 year university was all the classes they forced me to take and that made me a much more well rounded person. This gave me a much better understanding of the world than I ever would have got on my own. There is a lot to be said for this. Who knew that paleontology and mythology would be useful later? (it should also be pointed out that you won’t get this type of worldview from accelerated schools like Full Sail, Art Institute, or Expressions, but they will expose you to other types of creative disciplines)
This brings us back into the discussion about debt. If you have to go into a large amount of debt to get an education you really should question if the school you’re looking at will give you an advantage over lower cost options that wouldn’t put you in debt. Debt can be crushing. If you’ve never had $40,000 of debt it’s difficult to imagine it. And most students don’t do the math correctly. They 1) over-estimate what they’ll be making when they get out of school and 2) under-estimate the costs of normal living. You might say, well, if I make $40,000 a year when I get out, it shouldn’t take that long to pay off a $40,000 debt. Wrong. If you’re making $40,000/year you’re probably making $32,000/year after taxes and just scraping by after rent, car payments, food, insurance, buying a new computer every other year, and the occasional nights out. You’re not going to make a dent in that debt. In fact, most likely you’ll start adding credit card debt on top of it. For someone just starting out, it can quickly become stifling.
Which is not to say you can’t overcome it. But it will be FAR harder than you ever imagined. And the school you choose will give you few, if any, advantages.
I’ve met many designers, artists, photographers, and other creatives over the years. Some from fancy schools, some from state schools, some self-taught and the only common threads among the successful ones were a bit of talent, a joy in what they do, a willingness to work hard (because they enjoy it), and a knack for self promotion. Rarely has anyone made a comment about their schooling that has left an impression on me. When people talk about what inspired them, it is more often a specific teacher, an artist that was a mentor to them, or even a specific piece of art that connected with them powerfully.
Schools can provide a wonderful environment to learn, explore, improve your skills and grow as a person. But they can also leave you with so much debt that you find it difficult to continue that growth. It’s important to realize there are other options available to you and make the most of them.
This came to my attention and I had to buy one.
For $40 (from Amazon) you get an SD resolution macro video camera. If you’re fascinated by things that can only be seem with a high level of magnification this is great. The quality isn’t fantastic, but it’s good, especially considering it’s $40. It outputs via a standard (RCA) SD cable, so you should be able to capture the results.
A worthwhile toy for the video geek on your list…
Now that Avid has pulled out from NAB and won’t be exhibiting in 2008, here have been a lot of users and other folks wondering what it means and what the industry thinks of it. the immediate reaction of the entire industry was to exclaim, “No shit?” and 2.3 seconds later, after the full import of what that meant hit them, was to call their NAB sales rep adn promise all manner of favors if they could move their booth to front and center of the show floor. Since I’m hardly above such things (”I was young and poor and needed the booth space”), I joined in, attempting to mov the Plugin Pavilion into the now vacant space of the Avid Developer Community booth. I even had the person from Avid that managed the ADC to call NAB on our behalf. All that got me was a terse email from our NAB rep saying we would definitely NOT be getting it. It’s the new sport in HD, groveling for Avid’s booth space. Look for it on
the LVCC cafeteria monitors (instead of the usual strip club ads).
Somewhat more seriously, I think Avid’s decision says more about tradeshows than it does about Avid itself (or anything else). Personally, I more or less believe the official line that Avid is going to roll out some customer service initiatives and the money is being better spent there. There’s been some speculation that a merger is in the works and I think that’s unlikely. Usually mergers are preceded by less noise, not more. Avid’s gone out of their way to make a big deal about this both publically and internally to employees. The other reason to discount a merger is that they’re giving up the best booth location possible. If you’re going to exhibit, that’s the location you want. Also, Avid hasn’t done a booth at IBC since 2005 and doesn’t appear to be worse for it.
The other issue to consider is whether tradeshows really give you enough bang for your buck. As a smaller company, NAB is still critical to us. However we’ve stopped doing smaller shows, like DV Expo, because we
don’t get enough out of it. Judging from the size of the DV Expo show floor we’re not the only ones. If you’re Avid and dropping a million+ bucks on NAB… what else can you buy with that million+? If you’re spending that much money,
are you really getting that back? Tradeshows aren’t going away. I think people still like to get together, network, go for drinks, and test drive the products. Sending messages over LinkedIn and reading press releases just isn’t the same. However, many shows are diminishing in importance. For us, a 10×10 is plenty of booth space, especially as part of the Plugin Pavilion. Folks can come out, say hello, see new products, make sure we’re still in business, etc. A much larger booth doesn’t really buy us that much more, IMHO. For a company like Avid, it’s different because you can’t really downsize
the booth. If you do, you end up with all the same speculation that people are doing now. It’s either go big, or don’t go because going small gets pretty much the same reaction.
I think the main reason tradeshows still exist is we need to convince ourselves (and perhaps the IRS) that there is legitimate business stuff going on. The important stuff is the dinner, drinks, gambling, etc. (Truly critical to developing business relationships)… so do you really need to spend a ton of money on a booth? I don’t know… Just show up and do the dinner and drinks part. And as a bonus you don’t have to be at the booth at 9am! (yeah, I know… wishful thinking on my part)
So if they want to take the money and do a bunch of roadshows
instead, that might not be such a bad idea. Given that the economy seems to be slowing a bit, hotel rates and plane fares are increasing at a good clip, I wouldn’t be surprised if NAB had a flat year anyways. It might not be a bad time to go out to customers instead of requiring them to come to you. I don’t know if this is Avid’s plan, all I’m saying is that there are ways of reaching out to customers that don’t involve tradeshows.
Either way I give them credit for going against the conventional wisdom and blowing off NAB. Maybe it’s a mistake and they’ll be back in 2009, but maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg and we’ll see some changes in the way conferences and tradeshows are done, who participates, and who attends.