So you’re at the local drive-in, sitting in your hot rod with a swell filly named Loralane, and you’re necking her like there’s no tomorrow. Then the roller skating waitress glides up to your car and asks if you’d like the Moon Over My Hammy special, and Loralane says she won’t go to the box social with you this Saturday night unless you get her some grub.  But you reach in your pockets, pull them completely inside-out until a moth comically flies out, and it indicates to both Loralane and the roller skating waitress that you are not only broke, but you’re too poor to even afford a wallet to not hold the money you don’t have in the first place. Then she goes off with Butch from the Green Cobras on his dirt bike, and you go crying home while “Earth Angel” by Marvin Berry ominously plays from a mysterious location in the distance.

You know what your biggest problem was? That’s right, associating with those dastardly Green Cobras in the first place! Second biggest problem? You need a bunch of money! Well, if you’re in charge of your own post-production company then you are bound to have a ton of out of date equipment, because this industry is a constantly upgrading, uphill climb. And the higher you climb, the harder it will become to keep carrying all of your old stuff that you barely use anymore. So sell it!

I know, eBay is not a new concept to anybody, and I’m not one of those power sellers that make their living entirely off of selling things on eBay, so perhaps, if you wanted to be a jerk about it, you could nullify my entire philosophy on selling used goods, and go read a different article from Johnny P. Sells-A-Bunch with his fancy green star. But hey, I have a 100% positive feedback rating, that’s good, right?

One of my jobs as an assistant here is to sell old equipment and other various items in between my other tasks, when I have time. I try and squeeze in about one item a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. I’ve sold a bunch of items that have gone out of use around the office and made a bunch of scratch doing so. It’s not Donald Trump money, but it’s a decent amount of change for not doing a whole lot of work, AND it also eliminates the clutter of things you don’t need any more. Frankly, it prevents people from tripping over all the extra crap in the storage room. Hello money, goodbye lawsuits!

I would strongly suggest bailing on quasi-sentimental things, and just getting rid of them on eBay. Now, sure, you should probably keep that family heirloom pocket watch that your father gave you 10 minutes before he was tragically eaten by a great white shark, but do you really care about that wolf statue you got from your vacation in Arizona six years ago? Yeah it was a great vacation, but the only item you have is this stupid statue of a wolf, and you don’t even like wolves! You were in the airport gift shop and realized you didn’t buy any souvenirs, so you pitched out $60 for this handmade wolf statue.

Seriously, I would suggest taking a picture of it, that way you can always be reminded of the wolf through the photograph (if you actually desired to) and then try and scrape $20 for it on eBay. Do you realize that $20 can get you five Spicy Chicken Sandwiches at Wendy’s??? Or roughly NINETEEN Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers!!! What is the wolf statue getting you, sitting on your shelf…? It’s probably just getting you a nice collection of dust, and is in no way contributing to putting four Baconators in your stomach.

This might just be me personally, but I don’t really need a bunch of memorabilia to remind me of where I’ve been. Pictures are enough, just look at pictures, they don’t take up space, and they actually remind you of something more than the gift shop where you bought a wolf statue. That’s what I think of when I look at souvenirs, I think of the details of the store in which I purchased it at, not the vacation around it, that’s what the photographs are for. Maybe the wolf statue is a bad example, you probably don’t even have a wolf statue. And if you do, you probably bought it from me on eBay.

So thank you for funding two weeks worth of vanilla Frostees for me at lunch with your $20. I hope the wolf statue looks great on your mantle…

Sorry for the rant, I was just happy to get rid of that wolf statue. But the main purpose for this article is to show you a nice program that makes dealing with eBay a breeze. It’s called iSale, and it’s been around for a couple years, but it’s current version (5) is really good. I’ve used it to sell a ton of things around here on eBay, the profits of these items that we no longer use go right back into the company. Perhaps if you wanted to make a little extra money and didn’t think about selling things, this will nudge you into doing so.

Selling things not only helps you, but clearly helps whoever is purchasing them as well, since they clearly want what you are offering. iSale is pretty much a simple interface that creates good looking eBay templates, and let’s you plug in the details in a very clean and compact menu. When I buy things on eBay I do tend to get creeped out by the lame looking, one paragraph/sentence default descriptions that you see on some peoples auctions.

Clients and other various other people who have walked past me while I’m using iSale look over my shoulder and say “Wow! That looks easy! I would love to sell a bunch of junk I have, but I’m no good at using eBay…” Then I say “Yeah, can’t you see I’m trying to work here…?” And then they leave the room whispering something under their breath. I assume it’s about how awesome iSale is. All you have to do is set up your eBay account in the iSale preferences menu, and then iSale will do all the work in terms of dealing with eBay, I literally no longer even need to sign onto the eBay website. It essentially does everything the eBay auction setup does, but better, and faster. You don’t want to be stuck using eBay’s “awesome” design templates, do you?

Are you serious? That looks like something I would find on a crappy Geocities site. Well, I take that back, saying crappy Geocities site would imply that there are also non-crappy Geocities sites. The eBay templates look like standard Geocities sites.

But after the account setup, you pretty much just select a template, in which there is probably something that relates somewhat to the item you are selling:

Plug in all of the useful information in the very neat menu interface:

I think that looks a lot better and more coherent than the jibber jabber of the eBay item setup…

Then you take some pictures of your item. I always take my own pictures, it’s much better than just finding a product image online and doing a copy/paste job on it, it looks more reliable to take pictures of the actual item yourself. I like to take photos with poor lighting (yeah… that’s right… the poor lighting is on purpose… yeah…) and try to include my hand in the picture whenever possible.

Then you can drag them onto your template in the “drop picture here” areas, and you don’t get charged 15¢ for every picture after the first, assuming they can all be uploaded through your MobileMe, or FTP, or Macbay.

But just fill in the template where it tells you to fill in, and you’ve got yourself a very good looking eBay auction (probably as good as it could look, especially for how easy it was to do).

Then hit “Submit” and your auction is good-to-go!

The Suite Take

With iSale you should no longer have the excuse (in whiny voice) “But I don’t know HOW to use eBay…!” I’m pretty sure I could train my Mom to use this program if I wanted to (which I don’t). Yeah, it is $40. But if you think about it, if you upload 10 pictures of your item each auction, 9 of those pictures would cost 15¢ each on eBay, coming to a total of $1.35 per auction of 10 pictures. So the price of iSale will pay itself off in about 30 auctions! I guess if you only want to sell one or two things and then stop, maybe consider getting your nephew to help you out or something. But I highly recommend iSale if you are planning on selling a bunch of stuff on a consistent rate.

And apparently iSale 5 has a new integration with the iPhone, so you can take pictures and create the whole auction on the fly with your iPhone! I haven’t tried this so I can’t vouch for it, but it sounds pretty cool. Just throwing that out there!

So get on with it and sell that awesome wolf statue!

In junior high I started to restrain myself, and developed a general lack of enthusiasm for school. I became known as the “quiet kid” to anyone who wasn’t my friend. Once high school rolled around, I just stopped caring. Communication was at an all time low. I didn’t believe in anything, and my parents were freaking out. My teachers would ask me why I didn’t care about doing my math homework, I would respond with a shrug, followed by an eye roll, followed by detention, followed by another shrug. I had developed a complete lack of respect for authority, and no longer had any ability to talk reasonably with anyone over the age of 25.

Then college came around. All of the sudden girls were cornering me again, and doing more than kissing (though not in a Discovery Zone ball pit), and I had regained many of my communication skills in such a positive environment. The problem was though, that the awesomeness of freshman year would eventually end, and I crawled away from sunlight to live in crappy one-room apartments for the next 3 years. Watching free VHS rentals of rare French noir films from the library during the day, and only lurking out of my dwelling at night to party with the rest of the animals, didn’t help me develop into a model citizen. By the time I got out of college I was a pale, sickly hermit of a man who could only speak in Lord of the Rings references. To exemplify my point, here is a depiction of what I was like at the time:

So that gets us to the start of my first editing job, which is also my current editing job. I had come into this job with sort of a very, very unpolished professional attitude. I don’t mean that in a way that I spit on the ground and sleep on the job, I mean more that the only experience I had talking with people up to the point that I first started working here was immature conversations with people my age. Discussing why Back to the Future 3 is better than Back to the Future 2, stupid stuff like that. Now I was subjected to not only having to talk to people who didn’t grow up on the glory days of Nickelodeon, but the people I’d be talking to were clients, and saying the wrong thing could potentially put me out on the street!

I only had two jobs before I became an editor. When I was 16 years old my friend got me a job at Chicago Hot Dog at the local mall. The main perk of that job was that I really didn’t care if I got fired. So my relationship with the customers was absolutely horrid. I wouldn’t have put up with the crap I was giving to the customers. Maybe that’s why it closed down a few months after I quit (without two weeks notice), they kept hiring high school kids like me! Man, I was a terrible employee, but hey, I was 16 and making $6 an hour.

That was the same situation with my second job, which was a janitor after I graduated college. I was told I was going to be painting fences by the swimming pool when I filled out the application, but on my first day I was driving to multiple smelly park bathrooms, restocking toilet paper! The only communication skills I had to use were explaining to women why I was in the ladies room (“I’M CLEANING IT! I WORK FOR THE PARK DISTRICT! HERE’S MY ID BADGE! STOP FREAKING OUT!”). So as you can see my professionalism never really got off to a good start, which was a drastic change in my life when I entered the world of post-production.

Not to go into yet another back story of my life, but in film school, I was a one-man filming operation and I did all aspects of the production. Of all those aspects of production, I found the most enjoyment in the editing process. But editing my own projects in film school is a lot different than client based professional editing. In college, I would get home from class, eat dinner, sleep from 7 PM to midnight, then go to the edit lab in the basement of the communications building and edit in the dark, in absolute solitude, until maybe 5 or 6 in the morning. That was my perception of editing at the age of 21. I didn’t have anyone telling me what to do, or how to do it, so it was a completely different sport when I came here.

The first adjustment I made upon starting here, which probably happened out of fear more than anything and I still have trouble shaking it to this day, is that I have the overwhelming anxiety of saying the wrong thing. Or moreso, the offensive thing. I like to think that it is literally impossible to offend me, as I try and find humor in anything, but lord knows how many people I’ve met in my life who got offended by me somehow, without me trying very hard. So for the first long period of my working here, I just kind of shut down.

Even at risk of sounding egotistical, I think I’m somewhat witty, but that is a game of impulses, and in the work environment I’ve definitely tried to resist impulses. I think in the long run, I’m doing the right thing by not saying everything I think of that I think is funny. Because I find weird things funny, and I know there have been situations where if I pointed that out to a client, or even my co-workers, they would have looked at me like I was completely abnormal, and in the clients case, probably offensive. So restraint is a huge part of my day, but it has almost become an obsessive compulsive act, as now I find it hard to shake.

Another area of communication I had to deal with was responding to compliments. That was a very surprising one that I wouldn’t have initially thought would be a problem. I’m going to say that most compliments throughout my life have been back-handed, but I take pride in my work here in the creative realm, and every now and then I’ll get a real compliment. Right to my face. The last thing in the world that I want to do is start patting myself on the back in front of people, so I just get flustered trying to think of what to do next. I probably look like an mumbling idiot while doing so.

So I’ve tried complimenting the complimenter to mixed results, it kinda just puts them in the same position I was just in, and I don’t want to make people uncomfortable for trying to be nice to me. I think I’d rather take the humble approach and just coyly say “no problem” and smile, than show even the slightest bit of arrogance for doing my job correctly. There is an amazing and hilarious documentary called Overnight, about the guy who made the film The Boondock Saints, and I recommend it to anybody who wants to see just how costly arrogance can really be.

There is a lot of jibber jabber going on inside my head at most times, so when someone asks me a question out of the blue, especially a technical question, I sort of have to push aside the nonsense and consolidate a valid answer. The problem is, that while this is occurring, the visual of it is either me stammering around trying to get out the correct answer, or I will just stare blankly for a few moments while my mind gets to it. It probably confuses who ever asked me the question. I can only assume that most people (not just at work) find me moderately-to-significantly confusing. (Ask one of my ex-girlfriends about that…) So very often I’ve found the technique that works best is to repeat myself a lot. This also works because when people are explaining things to me, I find it easiest to listen and comprehend what their saying by not looking at them.

I’m terrible at eye contact, so when someone is talking to me, it probably appears as if I’m not paying attention, as I’m staring at the candy jar two feet to the left of them. This kind of sucks, because it makes me look like a jerk, but I’m in fact actually doing my best to comprehend what their saying! So I will often try to repeat back every step of what they just said (not verbatim of course) just to let them know that I heard what they said. It’s annoying, but it’s what I have to do, otherwise I look like I don’t care.

Despite any techniques I have, there are always screwballs. Even screwballs of the morbid kind. Not too long ago I came in for a weekend “side-job”, that was a memorial video for a nice fellow that had just died. I thought that the job would entail someone dropping off the materials and giving me 10 minutes of instruction, and I would spend all of Sunday editing by myself, college style. But it turned out that two of the family members would be sitting with me all day (which turned out to be a 14 hour edit [including scanning over a hundred photos]).

But I don’t know how to deal with grieving people, I don’t have much experience in that, and that’s compiled on the fact that I also have to communicate with them from a client-editor standpoint. Funeral directors go to school for learning how to communicate with grieving people! It wasn’t funny at all, like an episode of Dead Like Me… It was actually an incredibly stressful edit, as I was trying to get input from the guy who was literally writing the eulogy for the memorial service the following day, right there in the edit suite! I just took the approach of being as nice as possible to them, while focusing even more on giving them the best video I possibly could. That’s an approach I often take, make my work good enough to compensate for any lack of communication skills I have.

The SuiteTake:

I’ve been in a professional editing environment for 2 and 1/2 years now (not long by most standards I’m sure), but I get the feeling like while I still have a ways to go from a technical editing standpoint, I have an even further way to go in the client relations department. At the very least I try and be as nice as possible to clients so they don’t dislike me, but I realize greatly that I will probably never be as good an editor as I could be until I break the many bad habits I’ve developed in my life in terms of communication.

Most of my life I’ve just never been that much of a people person, but I’d LIKE to be, and I’m trying my best to change that. And I promise to never punch another client in the face for looking at me cockeyed. I realize now that it’s bad for business.

This is an ongoing study into the mind of an assistant editor, and the various small tasks he is assigned to.

An editing facility is a lot like an underground fight club. Except it’s cleaner. And more work gets done. And there aren’t any fights. It’s actually nothing like an underground fight club. But that would be awesome if it was.

Aside from misleading people with opening sentences, an assistant editor has many responsibilities that go beyond actual editing work. It’s these little things that are required of the job that not only make this place run infinitely times smoother, but they are also the reason that clients keep coming back. Having this delusion that these minor things are the most important aspect of the office is important in not only ensuring that you keep doing them, but it also boosts your ego and enables you to brag about your job to attractive women at parties.

These little tasks can vary from cleaning spots off the walls to making coffee for people who may not even drink coffee. The fact that you brought someone coffee out of surprise will make that person feel great, even if it makes them feel nauseous from the smell of coffee that they despise. Sure I have to dump the coffee out in the sink, which some would consider wasted coffee, but I actually consider it a job well done.

You have to take note of subtle cues from people around the office. If a client says in passing that they used to eat chocolate ice cream when they were a kid, surprise them at lunch with a one pound tub of chocolate ice cream. They will look confused and suspicious, but if you read them deep enough, you’ll know it’s what they actually want. At the end of the day, when you are cleaning up and you notice the ice cream has two spoon marks in it, you’ll realize what a great person you are.

Food is actually the life of the edit suite, and essential to ensuring that everything runs smoothly. We have 2 full snack bars and 2 fully stocks refrigerators loaded with goodies to keep people happy. Guess who stocks those? You guess it (I’m assuming you said me). Clients often look at the snacks and say “I can’t eat any of this, I’m on a diet” that’s when I swoop in and say “it’s no big deal, this stuff is all low calorie!”, then I proceed to gorge down a few bags of Cheetos and several candy bars. They will look at you in an odd way, and probably not eat anything at that time, but you’ll know it worked when you see those 4 Lifesaver mint wrappers on the client table at the end of the day. It’s also why I’ve gained 35 pounds since I started working here, but once I finally decide to start working out and it’s all converted to muscle, THEN we’ll see who’s laughing.

But you can’t just throw the food in a big pile and expect people to eat any of it. I have it all well organized with every label visible in a clean orderly fashion. If there is one thing I learned from Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, it’s that cans of corn will never move if you keep them in the cabinet. Try and “sell” the food to your clients and coworkers. Walk around yelling “DORITOS HERE, DORITOS, DELICIOUS DORITOS, GOT YOUR DORITOS RIGHT HERE” You’ll be surprised at how many people will take a bag of Doritos under the condition that you “shut up”. Way I see it, they took the bag of Doritos.

Cleaning the office is obviously essential, but also make sure the outside of the office is clean as well. This may be a regional thing, but we have a problem here in the Chicago-land area with geese (these are the same jerks that took down that plane over the Hudson). And these are geese that like to take craps everywhere, that I have to clean up.

There used to be one goose, who fouled our sidewalk all the time, so I went out there and tried to bargain with it, and gave it a french fry on the condition it would never come back. I didn’t take into account that the goose didn’t understand English, because it think it took it the wrong way and must have alerted his kin of the free delicious food, as all of the sudden there were 26 geese. It was like a Hitchcock movie mixed with an Aflac commercial.

Simple solution, I unleashed a wave of Chinese needle snakes to kill the geese. When they became a problem, I imported some gorillas to eat the snakes. The beauty of that is that when winter came, the gorillas simply froze to death!

Let me just say that 99% percent of the things an assistant editor does go completely unnoticed. But that is how it should be. We are the ninjas of the post house, our work is done in the shadows.

For instance, I spilled hot chocolate mix all over the counter and floor yesterday, and in a flurry of time I wiped down the counter with water, and vacuumed the floor to a perfect degree. Two minutes later when Tom walked in the room, he didn’t say anything about it, but the way I see it, he wasn’t SUPPOSED to say anything about it, because my silent duties were done correctly. Had I left all the hot chocolate mix all over the place and moved on to something else, Tom would have looked at me like I was a complete jerk. But when he came in the room and sat down and didn’t even seem to acknowledge that I was in the room, even after I said “hello”, I smiled a little bit, because I knew I was the hero this office needed.

They will never throw a parade for us, or give us the key to the city, but the look of oblivious normalcy on my coworkers faces are enough for me to keep doing what I’m doing. You could say that the assistant editor is the SINGLE most important person in the edit suite. You’d probably be wrong, but you COULD certainly say that. Much like you COULD say Legally Blonde is a better movie than Citizen Kane.

God speed, fellow assistants.

A decision was made by the high council of elders, at their shrine resting on the peak of the volcano, that I would be the chosen one to learn how to use a true 3D program. But I have no experience whatsoever in this area. This is my first job in this industry out of college, and to be honest, I didn’t even use something as basic as Photoshop a single time while I was in college! Let’s just say the most experience I had working on 3D was when I watched WALL-E a couple months ago. So I was nervous at the thought of learning this program, but at the same time excited at the possibility of what I could potentially do. I suppose the purpose of this post is to show you what it’s like to first delve into a 3D program if you have no idea what you’re doing, and possibly how it’s not as scary as one may think.

To help guide me along this journey, I enlisted the help of a tutorial on lynda.com by Larry Mitchell, titled “CINEMA 4D R10 Essential Training”. It’s actually not as complex an interface as you’d think by just looking at it. I’ll go into the details of that in a minute, but first I’d just like to note an occurrence that happened on my first day ever working in this program. Mr. Mitchell, in what seemed like he was possibly saying it in passing while talking about the content browser, mentioned something about accessing human models for use in in the program.

I shifted my eyes back and forth, as perhaps the computer was trying to tell me something, or someone was playing a joke on me, by giving me this glorious information now. Then Larry said “So, if you hit this Inverse Kinematics button, you can start to animate this human, but we are getting way ahead of ourselves here, back to the content browser.”

HOLD UP LARRY MITCHELL. You’re telling me that by just clicking this one button I can mess around with this human figure, make it do whatever I want? I’m sorry, but I am going to have to take a break from this tutorial, as I now feel obliged to mess around with this. So it wasn’t long before I figured out how to use the dimensional arrows and scaling tools to simulate the fake woman kicking the fake child.

And with a third human figure at my fingertips, how could I not add in the grown man doing a leg sweep…?

Through just futzing around in the content browser without any supervision, I figured out how to add texture to objects and even a sun!

Then as I seemingly finished amusing myself with this, I started playing the tutorial again, and not a minute later, Larry is saying “Oh, just press THIS button RIGHT HERE for quick easy animation keyframes.” …Really, Larry? Do you even want me to watch this tutorial? Next thing I know, I’m going through the content browser like a madman, building a house from basic shapes, adding grass, making brick textures, and animating a 90 frame woman to man slap for the ages (I’d have exported a real movie of it, but I don’t know how yet!)

I guess I wanted to show these displays of polygonal violence, because I came from no experience whatsoever in 3D, and I was able to do all of that while just messing around with stuff just 2 and 1/2 hours after I opened Cinema 4D for the first time! Not that any of this could be used for a real job around here or anything, but I learned a lot about how to move objects, and how to use the interface just from playing around. I got much more comfortable. (And if you’re wondering why I instantly resorted to violence, let’s just say I played a lot of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas my junior year of college, so I have a natural urge to harm people made of polygons)

After all that fun, I decided to resist the temptation of messing with the human figures anymore, and decided to continue with Larry Mitchell’s tutorials. Up next on the list was to create a spoon out of a cube. …OK? I like the idea, but even that seems strangely overwhelming to me, as morphing a cube into something of value is something that you would have to know what you’re doing in order to complete. But I guess it all starts with selecting a cube (and again, you can credit Larry Mitchell for this, I didn’t come up with it on my own).

OK, so now that we have a cube just sitting there, what’s next? That will be a spoon at some point…? Well, if you move those arrows on the cube with the scale tool, you can make it better, stronger, faster bigger, longer, flatter.

The four screen display was frightening at first glance, because I figured it would involve some insane complexity to use them. But they are actually pretty useful, as they obviously give you a top view or side view look at the 3D object, sort of simplifying it into 2D. And maneuvering between them is easy as pie, you just click the button in the top right corner of whichever screen you’d like to work in, and click it again to go back to the four screen display. Or you can just work in the four screen display if you’d like.

There is still a vast list of tools that I have no idea what they do yet, but I do know one thing, it takes a knife to make a spoon.

The knife seems like the most basic and useful tool, as its purpose is to segment polygonal shapes into, well, segments. And it works just like a real knife, just cut it across the shape while dragging the mouse.

And don’t make the same rookie mistake I did when working in a 2D viewing screen, and make sure you are cutting all the way through:

Cutting creates points in which you can select, and making new shapes becomes a very simple matter of selecting those points with the live select tool, and scaling them using the big colorful directional arrows with the scale tool.

So it was pretty simple to turn the cube into a lamp or a jousting stick or something, but a sweet little feature called HyperNURBS makes it unbelievably easy to turn a lamp into a Q-Tip. By clicking on the cube in your layer menu (which is comfortably similar to that of Illustrator or Photoshop) and then option clicking on the HyperNURBS icon on the top menu bar (which looks like a cube trapped in a cube prison) and all of the sudden you have instant curves, that work in a great way.

Then it’s just a matter of scaling and adding depth to the, i don’t know what it’s called, the “food” part of the spoon. And then I end up with a pretty good metal shovel.

Of course after some more fine tuning, cutting with the knife, scaling, and trying out some wood swatches (just for the fun of it all), I have a pretty good giant wooden 3D spoon.

If only I had a giant 3D metal pot so I could use my giant 3D wooden spoon to stir some 3D spaghetti meat sauce with polygonal sausage and peppers, I’d have a fantastic fake meal in the works! (don’t forget to HyperNURB the diced mushrooms!)

The SuiteTake Take?

I know making a spoon and animated violence with pre-made human models may be no big deal to someone who uses 3D programs a lot, but to someone with no idea what their doing in Cinema 4D, I just wanted to show how easy it is to start working in 3D, and it’s not as threatening as it may possibly appear to a novice. Just look at me, I made a wooden spoon out of a blocky cube 4 hours after my first opening of a 3D program!

In the future I’ll do a follow up post to let you know how my training has progressed. 

Let me ask you a serious question; when you are editing a project and sitting in deep thought, contemplating what to do next, how many times do you think about purchasing a new line of make-up, and more so, how many times do you wish that someone would personally come to you while you are working to sell you that make-up? If your answer was higher than zero, then maybe this post isn’t for you.

Essential to any good edit.

Several months ago, I was sitting alone at a computer working on a project that needed to be done by the end of the day. All of the sudden two attractive young women in their early twenties, come strolling in the room. I am surprised and confused at this, yet not upset. Sure, they completely broke my chain of thought towards the project I was working on, but they were incredibly cute. After an awkward few seconds of me squinting at them to see if they were perhaps a gas leak induced hallucination, I finally said hello.

Me – “Hi there… What can I do for ya?”

Susie – “Hi, how’s it going?”

Me – “Well I’m doing alright, how about you?”

Nancy – “We’re doing great!”

Me – “Neat!”

Susie – “Yeah!”

Me – “Sooooo. What’s new?”

Nancy – “Ya know, same old same old.”

Me – “Yeah same here…”

Susie – “This is a great place you have here.”

Me – “I built it with my bare hands.”

Susie – “Really?? That’s awesome!”

Me – “Sure is!”

Nancy – “I like your shoes too!”

Me – “These are $15 dollar shoes, quite a bargain, huh?”

Nancy – “Wow! That IS a really good bargain!”

Me – “Haha, yeah. Listen, to be honest, I have no idea who you are, or why you’re here…”

That’s when seemingly out of nowhere, they pulled out a box of make-up and asked me if I wanted to purchase any. They probably could have guessed by the amount of rouge, eyeliner, and lipstick I had on at the time that I was very interested in purchasing make-up, because I was really caking it on that day. But I had to decline their offer, because as expected, a 24 year old man has no interest in purchasing make-up on a whim. When they asked me if I wanted to buy it for my girlfriend, I said I had no girlfriend at the moment. Then they told me I should get a girlfriend. That made me realize how lonely I am, so I started sobbing uncontrollably until they slowly backed out of the room.

It's smart to take 10-15 make-up breaks a day whilst editing. It's good for concentration.

What they did in effect was 3 things:

1. Completely ruined my self confidence.

2. Distracted me from the goal at hand (my editing project), which made me forget what I was going to do next.

3. Essentially wasted a large chunk of my work time, when they had no business there in the first place.

Typical door-to-door salesman.

Door-to-door salesmen are pretty much some of the most anger inducing, useless people I’ve ever encountered. I know that sounds mean, but never once have I ever wanted someone to interrupt what I was doing to sell me the most random garbage you could possibly think of. Make-up, briefcases, waste management services, paneling; this is all stuff that not only do I have absolutely no desire to obtain, but it is stuff that if I did need, I would have already gotten, or put some thought into getting. Joe Schmo salesman never comes into our office and sparks my memory on something I actually want to buy, and if I did want to buy it, I’d probably just get it on the internet for cheaper like a normal person. If you are selling a random service, you don’t walk into a building that does something in which you have no idea what they do and try to sell them something they clearly don’t need. It’s almost like going into McDonalds, and trying to sell the cashier a timeshare. People are waiting in line behind you, she won’t buy anything from you, so you’re wasting everyone’s time and being a jerk.

"Would you like fries with that?" "No, but would YOU like a timeshare?!?!"

I know I know, they are just trying to make a living in this bad economy, I should cut them some slack. But then again, when a stranger walks into our office unannounced looking for “the owner” who’s name he does not know, and tries to sell him train tickets, it borders on ridiculous. I mean I know that I personally buy train tickets at random while I’m working, because I love the convenience of traveling to mysterious places by train out of nowhere, and I will often get on a train to anywhere when I get off of work, just to see what adventures I will end up on. But that’s just me. Though I love it when people interrupt me while I’m with a client so that I can plan my exotic train vacation to Montana, I’m fairly confident that most other people wouldn’t want that. To be honest, I don’t know why…

YOU tell ME a better way to travel than this. Good luck...

As an assistant editor, it is one of my duties to ward off solicitors, to make sure that they don’t bother the editors while their working. Here are a few tips to make the whole situation smoother.

1. Establish a friendship with them early:

When they come in the door, start off the conversation with a nice phrase like “Hey, scumbag, what the hell do you want?”

"Whoaaa, hoho, I can tell you're a guy in need of some denim jackets in bulk! Take my card!"

2. Set the correct tone to ensure a pleasant stay:

Spitting on their face may be a little harsh. So consider spitting on their shoes or shirt. If by chance you happen to have a whipped cream pie handy, it would be appropriate to toss that into their face. (Just make sure they don’t duck out of the way, making your pie hit an old rich fellow).

Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk

3. Make sure they feel comfortable during their time here:

For months I’ve lobbied to get a pit bull at the office, because nothing says “come on in” like a huge dog foaming at the mouth running towards you at high speed.

Release the hounds.

4. Find creative ways to let them know how much you love them:

Install a trap door, it doesn’t have to lead anywhere in particular, maybe just a dirty pit, or even a fiery pit. Or go medieval, and have a cauldron of boiling tar above the door. One pull of a string, and all of your problems will go away!

Ya know, trap doors are a lot easier to build than you think.

5. Show them they are welcome before they walk in the door:

We had a traditional “No Solicitors” sign outside our office.

But that didn’t really seem to do the trick. That’s why I recently revised it to make sure they get the point.

Telemarketers are a beast of a different nature. At least you have to commend door-to-door salesmen on having the gusto to annoy you to your face, while telemarketers simply sit in their cubicles and call numbers on a list.

Don't trust the pretty face and the cute headset. There is only darkness behind those eyes.

It is impossible to dump boiling tar or unleash your rabid dogs at them, so it is horribly frustrating when a telemarketer calls you. Often they will call you and say something along the lines of “Hi, buddy! How’s my favorite Burr Ridge editor doing today?!” Indicating that perhaps they are long time friends with you, and waste your time for 2 minutes small talking with you until they try and get you to invest in a website. Then it becomes a matter of whether to cuss them out, say “No Thanks”, or just hang up the phone abruptly. But I’ve perfected a new method of dealing with telemarketers. Once I realize they are trying to sell me something, I simply turn the tables and try and sell them something! You’d be surprised at how much it throws them off kilter. It’s also why no less than 13 telemarketers are now proud owners of Scott Roberts brand homemade wicker baskets.

It's just big enough to put their soul into. If they had one...

I like to think that maybe there is an overall head solicitor, like a head vampire, and you just have to drive a telephone through his cold, shriveled heart, and all of his salesmen minions will be free from their annoyance spell. I think the world needs salesmen, I think they are necessary in order to buy goods your company needs, however, I’m referring to specialized salesmen who have something you actually want, NOT door-to-door salesmen or telemarketers, who I think are giant human mosquitos. Because honestly, you can be polite as possible with them; take their cards, shake their hands, give a fake smile; but why would they assume that an editor hard at work would like to be interrupted in front of their clients, so that they can learn a little bit about long distance phone services?

How to Deal with Telemarketers

There was this heavyset kid in my high school who constantly had stains all over his shirt.  It was disgusting; it was as if he never washed his shirt.  Food stains, drink stains, dirt stains, indescribable stains, whatever they were they were all horrifying.  One day someone started calling him The Venus CrapTrap.  Then everyone started calling him The Venus CrapTrap.  Then rumors and jokes started to form around him being able to statically attract filth to himself, as if he were able to walk into a room and all of the garbage in the room would fly across the room and stick to him.  I’m sure it didn’t make his life very easy, as everyone had this unfair perception of him based on his filthy shirts.  I happened to eat lunch with him a few times, and he was an all right guy.  He was just unimaginably lazy.  But he was really smart, interesting, and an all around likeable chap.  But he had the label of being a horrifying beast based on his external appearance.  Now you see where I’m going with this?  DVD labels are the same way, the content on the disc may be awesome, but if the label is trash, it will put people off from the whole thing.

By the way, Mike (The Venus CrapTrap) now works in a warehouse.  I know you’d like me to say he’s now better than all the people who used to put him down, but he is seriously one of the laziest people I’ve ever met.

I make a lot of simple DVD labels for clients around here, in a program called Discus.  There are a few do’s and don’ts, and I’d like to share a few tips to make sure no one is giving your label a bad label.  

Tip #1:  Keep It Simple

I would strongly insist that you try not to clutter up your label with mishmash and too much information, make it look simple and elegant.

DO:

DON’T:

Tip #2:  Keep It Appropriate

Despite the subject matter of the video, if you are going to include a picture on your label, make sure that the end result is a disc that you would hand to your grandmother.

DO:

DON’T:

Tip#3:  Keep It About the Client

I know you think that because you’re making the label it all the sudden becomes about you, but remember that it is about the client, not the assistant editor in the long run.

DO:

DON’T:

Tip#4:  Keep It Relevant

Some subjects may not be interesting enough to make an awesome DVD label.  That doesn’t mean that you should try and jazz it up with something that has nothing to do with anything.

DO:

DON’T: 

Tip#5:  Keep It Professional

I would highly suggest if you’re handing your million dollar client the disc for the video that he spent a month working on, you should make it on an actual label making software, like Discus.

DO:

DON’T:

Tip#6:  Keep It Real

You should only put information that a client has actually specified on your labels.  You don’t need to spice it up with your own hype.  That’s what the client’s marketing team is for.

DO:

DON’T:

Tip#7:  Keep It Consistent

I know there are a lot of crazy fonts that you’ve always wanted to use, but your client’s DVD label isn’t the place to experiment.

DO:

DON’T:

Tip#8:  Keep It Legible

You should probably use colors that work together.

DO:

DON’T:

Tip#9:  Keep It Unbiased

It doesn’t matter if you object to the video that the DVD is based on, you shouldn’t voice your opinion on the label.  Just do your job!

DO:

DON’T:

Tip#10:  Keep It In the Realm of the Business

I know your a creative, artistic person.  And I know you love painting avant-garde artwork in your spare time.  But your artsy fartsy style doesn’t belong anywhere on a corporate DVD.

DO:

DON’T:

Well I hope that helps you do the right thing when you make those crucial choices in your DVD labels!