YouTube:
Digital Grunt. Via MeFi. Oh, this is glorious ... cathartic. A frenetic style of work that was beshat upon us with the promise of increased production speed through the use of ‘newfangled’ computers. We were doing the same thing in the ‘80’s, but with much slower systems. I replaced Forox cameras and a roomful of cut-and-paste artists. Back when it took transferring through six programs to get a single Mac Pixelpaint image over to PC Targa format (Photoshop 1 hadn’t been released yet - what a godsend it was). No Red Bull back then, just coffee and really bad NY pizza (the indigestion would keep you awake for days). Many’s the time the only light I saw was through the frosted glass of the men’s bathroom - awoken from those rare periods of unconsciousness by the dulcet tones of the office PA system (or Leon, for those post-Aniforms buds who still read here) - wrapped in bubble wrap and duvateen on the floor at the foot of my TVL system. In the A/V business, there was only one rule ... the show must go on. Failure truly was not an option.
I love the little touch at the end, the gofer handing the programmer a cup of Starbuck’s coffee. After you’ve broken your mind for days with no sleep, a simple gesture by someone - anyone - does bring tears of gratitude and a renewal of work energy. Each time you succeed in managing an impossibly short production schedule, management decides that timeframe is the new ‘normal.’ This whole video takes me right back. Scarily so.
