Wings Over the Pyre

09:09 am - Options

There is a certain difficulty in having a mind of such dire and twisted cunning that it manages to absorb new skills before you have the social or emotional scaffold to slip them into it comfortably. Most people don't have anything like that problem, quite the opposite; they develop empty skeletons with huge gaping holes for ideas but never seem to find anything that actually works in them (see, for instance, any Democratic talking point for the last eight years, but I digress).

I have such a mind.

The primary difficulty with it at this particular turn is that I've spent the last, oh, several months pretty dead certain that I should go into radio/audio production, in part because there's just no way I'd ever be considered something to put down in front of a camera instead of behind one, and there's a certain pleasure in actually having your presence appreciated, in the way I'm certain a captive audio-audience would be for my dulcet tones.

Unfortunately for me, then I started tinkering about with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. Starchild had the cruel insight to get me the Classroom in a Book: After Effects 7.0 text and I've been working my way slowly through that thing. (If anyone bought me the Premiere Pro 2.0 version of that book, I'd probably never be heard from again.) Tinkering led to insight, and insight led to more tinkering, and then ...

Well, it led me to putting together my first significant project. The Zombina and the Skeletones' video for End of the World which I assembled from 50's and 60's footage on Archive. If you didn't see it the first time, well ...

Amusingly, I emailed Zombina about the fact I posted it and she was pretty clear that the band dug it. I'm pretty pleased with it, myself. Not bad for a few days' invested effort in trying to figure out the basics of composited effects and clip cross-fades. Certainly as good as most of the video production during the 80's, n'est pas?

But that brings us to my quandary. I like doing video editing, extracting shot sequences, remixing them different ways and trying to keep pace and rhythm with the music or dialogue. It even seems I'm good at it. It might be worth pursuing as a career option; commercial composition, some writing, FX design, indy film-making (because everyone knows they want to be directors and producers, but who volunteers to be the editor?

But I'll never be the guy in front of the camera there. At best, I'll be a disembodied voice, a narrator, a haunt. Worst, I'll be the nobody nobody ever remembers is responsible for the whole look and colour of the piece.

On the other hand, in radio, I can DJ all night long, I can podcast, I can tinker my AFX and filters and tight audio edits (of the sort AlTV is famous for, like the K-Fed interview). I can be the melodious late-night haunter of the dials, and wrought with mysterious darkness, like an utterly non-emo version of Johnny Fever at WKRP ...

OK, maybe not nearly that cool. Possibly equal to Christian Slater as Hard Harry in Pump Up the Volume. Maybe I can convert that on over to a shot at sliding into Heathers.

Anyway, in the final analysis, I feel myself lured to doing editing for video and film projects and feeling like it's only in the radio area that I can get the degree of personal recognition I was missing in my last career.

Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts.

At some point, I'll have to pick a place to intern at.

Current Mood: confused