NOR'EASTER
An Awesome Autumn in New York
by Carrie Puchkoff
 Carrie Puchkoff |
It seems like every street corner in New York City is jumping with urban liveliness and energy––and not just from new construction sites. It’s also evident among film and television crews throughout the city. All this activity is keeping our East Coast members busier than ever and the buzz is just as strong inside the Eastern Region Office.
New Appointments
Early in September, Marc Laub was hired as our new Eastern Region Organizer.
Please give him an enthusiastic welcome, as his experience as an editor and
Guild member since 1964 gives the organizing process a unique perspective
and edge. “There are non-union gaps in the post-production process––telecine,
technical support, sound, special effects and digital intermediate,”
Laub says. “My mandate is to unionize those facilities. Our assistant
editors have the most interaction with these facilities and I will be relying
on them to help me identify employees and targets.”
As a result of Laub’s appointment, I am also pleased and honored to be named to fill his seat as a full Director representing the Eastern Region on the Editors Guild Board.
Special Events and Training News
A members-only showing of Holly-woodland kicked off the Guild’s fall
screening season, thanks to John Johnston, regional sales manager at the Kodak
Screening Room, and Jeff Roth, senior vice president of post-production at
Focus Features. Our Assistant Executive Director Paul Moore, who co-chairs
the New York Production Alliance, helped coordinate this successful screening.
The East Coast Training Program commenced its fall season of seminars and workshops with a presentation in October by Diana Weynand, author of Final Cut Pro for Avid Editors, who held an in-house presentation of tips and tricks for multi-camera editing on Final Cut Pro 5. Don Peebles, Apple systems engineer, also stopped by to discuss how Motion and Soundtrack applications can be integrated with Final Cut Pro.
In response to overwhelming member requests for After Effects courses and seminars, Steve Whatley, applications manager for Adobe, will demonstrate designing motion backgrounds, animating Photoshop files, creating interstitials and performing motion stabilizing and cloning on After Effects 7.0 in November. Also that month, Apple will host a Final Cut Pro weekend workshop event at the Soho Grand Hotel. These sessions will emphasize workflow for offline editing of film and television in High Definition, as well as a hands-on workshop with MacBook professionals geared towards Avid editors ready to take on Final Cut Pro. Special thanks to Fritz Ogden, Jessica Steigerwald and the professional applications team at Apple, and member Estelle McGechie, an Apple consultant.
For our Training Room, Michael Phillips of Avid Technology arranged for an upgrade of our Avid Xpress Pro to the new Avid Media Composer software version integrated with Avid Mojo DNA Hardware. He presented a demo on tape-less, file-based workflow, along with the newly developed automated script-based editing and DigiDelivery, later in October. In-house courses also continue this fall with member instructors covering beginning-to-advanced-level trouble-shooting in Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, Lightworks and ProTools.
The generous donations of equipment, upgrades for our systems and vendor-sponsored
presentations keep our membership educated, practicing and working with state-of-the-art
applications and tools. Podcasts of these events will soon be posted on our
revised website, www.editorsguild.com.
Untapped Resources
The Guild continues to broaden its educational outreach initiative in cooperation with the City University of New York (CUNY). Highlights of this cooperation include internship opportunities for students from Medgar Evers College Department of Theater, Film and Broadcast at our New York office, and the attendance, remote recording and editing of several industry in-house seminars by the broadcasting students at Kingsborough Community College (KCC). Moore arranged a tour of sound mixing and editing facilities at Sound One for students from Medgar Evers and the Ghetto Film School, which provides opportunities for high school filmmakers to expand skills by working with industry professionals.
The Guild is committed to continue strengthening its relationships with CUNY and other schools to further industry standards and internship opportunities for minority and non-traditional students. The relationships fostered will be mutually beneficial as union awareness will be promoted and career opportunities will become available to a new generation of industry professionals entering the workforce.
According to John Acosta, Guild member and lecturer at CUNY and KCC, “We feel very strongly about infusing our curriculum with industry-standard technology and professional workflows and felt it important to have the Avid and ProTools editing stations tied into a Unity Network in our Media Lab. While balancing academic needs with vocational/technical training is not easy to do, we continually strive to do it better. Our collaboration with the Editors Guild has been a wonderful resource for our students; they are given the opportunity to venture outside of our college to videotape and edit seminars that tie into our classroom instruction.”
Carrie Puchkoff is an Assistant Editor who represents the Eastern Region on the Guild’s Board of Directors. She can be reached at carrie@puchkoff.com.