Chapter Seven - Spaceships, Satellites, and Alphabet Soup
I ended up with a B.A. in Film Production from UCLA and became a corporate video editor, producer, writer, and live event director for twelve-and-a-half years. Ironically, I think it paid just over minimum wage to start.
As an adult, I have taken on Executive Assisting as my day job to pay the bills.
When I passed my five-year anniversary as Architect/Urban Designer Bill Fain’s EA, both my mom and dad separately congratulated me on the longest I’ve been able to hold down steady work. Apparently, my career in corporate video didn’t count.
I had the best on the job training as an editor. The story goes that my mentor was the heir to a fortune, and in the living trust, his mother had stipulated that for him to receive any inheritance, he had to work while she was alive. He came in at ten-thirty, left at three, and took a two- hour lunch. I did the majority of his work, often staying overnight.
The first session with him, he gave me a tip on how to be successful. He fanned out a five-page script in front of me, told me to pick any page, not the first or the last, and toss it.
Now cut the movie.
What???!!!
But who was I to question him? I was seventeen years old. He had edited an Academy Award nominated short subject documentary. I sliced together the show with the middle page completely gone. I was sure I was going to be fired. I’d been on the job two months.
The next morning, the writer/producer, client, client’s boss, and my mentor screened the video less the page.
The client goes, “Great. Gets the message across really concisely. Short and to the point.” He turns to the writer. “None of the excess verbiage you like to write. Run copies. We’re showing it to Congress this afternoon.” No one noticed the missing material.
While sitting in a fancy edit bay, there are lots of buttons. Circle wipes, dissolves, levers to fly images in and out. My mentor had only one lesson: don’t press those buttons and find cool effects to use. Look at a blank screen, visualize what you want to create and use the buttons to realize what you envision.
Especially these days, when video editing comes standard on a PC and computer software makes everything from animating to music composition easier, don’t let technology drive your creativity. Your creativity drives the vision.
Working at a space and electronics company made me develop a great love of Apollo, Gemini, and the Space Shuttle missions. It made me appreciate the military and the servicemen who were serving our country, while I was safely tucked away in an edit bay cutting shows on MilStar and BCIS military systems, PMMW cameras, MBE and MBRE microchips, GRO’s, SBIRS, and DSP satellites, M-SATS, COMSATS, ROCSATS. EOS, MOS, and many, many more.
The only real qualification for working there seemed to be knowing your alphabet.
To get to be just a little part of these technologies that many brilliant engineers were spending their lives inventing and perfecting was amazing. Often, they didn’t feel they were doing anything creative. But literally, their imagination, drawings, and calculations were taking men to the moon.
Most awesomely, my dad (an aerospace engineer who had gotten me my job at seventeen) and I had things to talk about.
I learned, for example, that when we said he was in charge of attitude control, it was about satellite stabilization in orbit and not some psychological punishment for the way I spoke to my mother.
Above is a photo of the satellite my dad worked on for too many years to count.
I loved this job. Do what you love.
Comments