Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Pink Floyd - Wall (Disc One), The - Another Brick In The Wall (Part III) (Squid's Redoubt)

Oh, look, Guise has provided me with the front of my own school handbook, from “Saint Zamiel’s Cthonic School.” I suppose that in this enlightened day and age, we have to drop the “for Girls” and simply roll with what we have in terms of mixed populace, but we all know where my heart lies, with helping those poor, emotionally put-upon members of our society who’ve run away from home, been arrested, or whose parents just don’t know what to do with them. Oh, yes, and have at least C-cups.

I am considering placing jaila in charge of dealing with the boys’ dorms, however. Don’t think overmuch on this.

Oh, don’t forget to check out the page on sports and athletic facilities at SZCS.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: I Am Ghost - Crossing The River Styx (Squid's Redoubt)

Short version: I survived. And they even let me have a piece of paper that says so.

Somewhat longer version: I'm now the proud owner of a diploma in basic and advanced broadcasting and announcing from the Atlanta Broadcast Institute. At no point did I actually kill anyone, despite any overwhelming desire to do same, nor did I actually burst into flame and immolate, despite it being suggested that I could really use a Valium. The 60min radio show we had as a final actually went off without even the slightest hitch, which I can only lay at the feet of obsessive and hyper-aggressive pre-planning and the truly lazy geek's helper, not over-rehearsing.

There are a few pictures from the graduation, but unfortunately, power to the camera died before more than just a few basic shots could be grabbed. Despite that, somehow I managed to be in a couple of them.

Bugger.

Tomorrow, I'm headed down to Project961 with Swan and Speir to see if they'll actually accept me as an intern. ("The 35 Year Old Intern" sounds like a movie title.) Hopefully, they will and I can start memorizing the manual for the NexGen VoiceTRACing system they use to semi-automate the station.If anyone can become familiar with a complicated, interlaced, multi-node distributed audio database in under three days, it's me. Who's better qualified? Besides, the thing's built on Novel Netware 6.5. How complicated can it be, with a retro underpinning like that? Novel is migrating to SuSE Linux, itself, so I'm already positioned ahead of the curve ...

Regardless, we'll see if I get on. Could be you'll be hearing me on broadcast radio in under 6 months. Not bad for a guy going through the equivalent of a midlife crisis without the 20 year old models, right? (The sports car, I already have.)

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Guitar Wolf - Let's Get Hurt (Squid's Redoubt)

So, yeah. Next week is finals for me, with Rolling Radio being spread over two days of frenzied nightmares and the video editing project being up as well.

That last is of interest because I finished it, already. Mind you, I did something slightly ... unexpected.

The assignment:

Take this pile of stock footage shot in Atlantic Station. Put together a video with at least a 60sec voice over and a background audio track that comes up and down as appropriate under at least one interview. For extra credit, do a stand-up intro for the piece (you may borrow one of the school's cameras to do so).

Obviously, what they expected was a sort of dynamic, upbeat commercial insert for Atlantic Station.

What they will get is pointedly not what they expected.

I fear my sense of humour is dangerously perverse.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Die Krupps - Nothing Else Matters (Squid's Redoubt)

How in Hades' name did I end up seriously bopping along to both I Am Ghost and Nashville Pussy in the same hour-long period? I mean, really, angry-goth metal and high-energy punk-rockabilly coursing through my veins like some kind of twisted Super Soldier Serum, turning me into a sunlight-scarred supervillain of high-speed driving sensibilities ... Disturbing, indeed!

That said, there's more music on the Redoubt. Yay, eMusic, my one and only true musical friend. Alright, Eric the .5b does a lot of recommending, too, but I usually just end up buying from eMusic anyway ...

New Redoubtcast up on Archive, and you can listen to it straight off there. Bit out of the usual niche, given it's a recording of me practicing radio board ops in one of the editing bays at school, but there's plenty of music in there, too. You get what you get.

A bit scattered post this morning, I know, but I've been busting my sorry little squid ass for the past couple weeks, hanging out with the likes of Bruce Jones and Tom Regan, learning to light scenes and run a video switcher, and generally just sucking up data like a sponge. Today's going to be an absolute pleasure, with the first half devoted to the Avid editing suite and the afternoon thrown at Adobe Audition. Pretty much a totally relaxing day that I'll be able to just amble through and get things done in sweetly agile time.

Things are generally going OK here, between class and daylight. Mornings kind of bite, but eh. The more things I learn, the less I'm sure I know what I actually want to do. I've got the voice and basic technical skills to be on-air radio talent. but there's a strange affinity for video editing and maybe news direction lurking in the back of my head. So ... yeah, I'm vaguely torn, at this point.

Maybe someone'll make me an offer before I'm out and save me the trouble of deciding.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: Hayseed Dixie - Highway To Hell (Squid's Redoubt)

I suppose I should say something about class this past week, if I were sane.

Well, if I were.

To sum up a week's experience in the brief: It's been freakin' great.

Alright, perhaps not that great, but I definitely feel like I'm in something I can actually accomplish, which I'll cop to being mildly concerned about in the run-up. I've been focused and on top of things to the point where other folks in the class are asking me questions with the full expectation that I'll have answers, and I usually do, which is magnificent for an already bloated ego. They even ask me to hang about before/after class and help them get their board ops down and frankly I hate that bloody thing.

Probably less than I'll hate the camera next week as I have camera ops starting Tuesday. I'm thinking this place probably doesn't have a robotic suspension crane and the interface to a tracking system -- which perversely or not, I'd actually have some experience working, as they have a lot in common with the robotic armature systems I tinkered with in college Industrial Robotics.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: 8 Bit Peoples - hally / xmas songs plastic sputnik arcade punk remix (Squid's Redoubt)

Well, so, yeah. I guess I technically qualify as a "student" again, having paid my tuition. I just need to decide whether I want to take day or night classes, get through them, then do my internship. And then, find / steal / create a job.

It's ... weird. ABI has an Avid editing suite, which I've been dying to get my twisted tentacles on for years. Kind of frightening. By the time I'm done, I'll have a dense overview of pretty much every facet of audio / visual production. There's a lot of fun in that, and a lot of hyperdense data to accumulate in my brainmeats.

I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with some instruction. Which involves admitting I'm not fully aware of all data in the universe, so it's a hard admission.