A collection of frustrations
I am a producer. By trade and temperament. I am also a bit OCD, a Virgo, and can focus for long periods of time. A skill inventory test at 25 revealed I would make a good architect, model maker and army officer. I can only take that to mean that my propensity for visual expression (photography, directing of 24 frames per second, art history, painting and sculpture), a reliable understanding of spatial relations and consistent attention to detail have morphed into my role as an Executive Producer in the realm of unscripted verite.
https://imuapress.com/2017/10/05/with-your-wild-furies/image-20/
To that end, I pursued a career in this field because I felt, at the time, that documentary filmmaking would satiate a voracious curiosity. I wouldn't have to commit to just one academic discipline to become submersed in, no, I could cover the waterfront, making films on everything I found interesting, everything not talked about.
Becoming a producer was a long road, but it felt like I had been thinking that way my entire life. It was beyond 'multitasking' because your end game was telling the best story while racing daylight.
You had to keep it together (army officer), have vision (architect) and pull of a long chain of details that contribute to a final product that must resonate with a wide range of people, who may or may not be inclined to seek your point of view.
So you must cajole, convince, some would say manipulate, others would call it a jedi-mind trick, but you learn to read people and interpret them back to themselves.
That takes most of your time. Your life falls away. Burn out, brown out, destruction of life and limb, loss of property, love and youth. All for the sake of telling the most authentic story.
The tools of the trade always involve concepts, writing, stepping back and being able to visualize the big picture, managing difficult actors, motivating whiny editors, wrangling unruly crew, and seamlessly seeming calm, cool and collected about every problem big and small.
This leads to the question of time, which ends up in productivity, the cloud, the underground and tick tock cuckoo clock time is money right now sooner rather than later, urgency, rush, expedient, ahead of the pack, outpace the competitors, make your fortune and run. The games, the mind maps, the crashes the inevitable lies and misleading pitch information - the best 'xyz' ever -- with no qualifications because who has time to read past your oversell these days?
Well here is what I have gathered of eviscerating details relating to applications supposed to make my life easier so I can manage the havoc and get back on my feet, catch up with the time-space continuum and return to producing many moving parts. At this rate, I'm still trying to get google slides to cooperate with power point helper -- the hamburger helper of microsoft apps -- and as usual, finding again how much I hate google for production. It's not fluid. It's corporate. Now, you will say, microsoft is the definition of corporate. And I would agree with you on certain peculiar attitudinal things that drive me nuts about their infrastructure of interfaces and overtures of peace, but then they fixed outlook and it's the only reliable heavy lifter when it comes to dastardly freelance emails over twenty years of cover-your-ass colleagues.
Office 365 could definitely be improved from my point of view as a creative professional small business, it's essential. I use Word religiously (since they killed Word Perfect which I have forgotten now, but at the time, it had a few superior functions for writers, which I was at the time) -- and I have recently become a fan of mobile powerpoint and sway (I like it better than dropbox paper or paper 53) for visualization of concepts.
We'll see how smartsheet and moxtra, two other integrations work. Wunderlist was redundant and clunky not intuitive just straight left brain nag. I use evernote for that, simple note for quick markdown, and bear for thematic ideas.
I have found the hard way that one cloud is not enough so I have dropbox and One Drive. IT is, in fact, One Drive that recently saved the day by having an older video I needed for my reel when it somehow had disappeared in the last transfer from dead mac to new mac.
Now when I am asked by the app to rate them in the app store after they have crashed or proven irrelevant in a barrage of basic 'fails,' I may write a snarky review. I wish they could verify 'human' v all the bots who say great app so broken english only available to Singapore...
_______ _______ . ________
--what follows is the first in a series of reviews based on my use of, in real life, on an iPhone 7. This was for a blogger/blogspot assistant app, which failed and then failed again and then lost my work and would never attach photos like you see here.....
I prefer wordpress as google abandons their platforms (their corporate policy is like the food Americans throw away, they throw shit against the wall to see what sticks--who else would invest in then abandon vertical gardening to save the world? because it wasn't profitable like the self-driving car...) and blogspot/blogger is one that clunks along to no avail.
But I started here. My dad's best friend read my work here, in the early days, and was a fan. That kind of stuff matters to me more. I want to automate much of my drudgery so I can spend whatever remaining years I have doing more of the work I want to do -- which is contributing to the positive advancement of humankind.
It's a long story and lofty goal but wasting time on apps that imaginary millennials develop and then abandon when they graduate from USC Video Game Program, to stay in their virtual bubble, eating fresh greens, watching you tube and chatting encrypted with the CIA.
Entitled "so-so"
Re the app used to post this, the name of which I forget-
Rule Number One: get a memorable name like snapchat, twitter, yahoo-- you can suck but people still remember you, like mtv, nixon and elvis.
I'm finally ready to abandon this app after four attempts to post photos, which it says it does. It has so much potential, easy to use and navigate, but it doesn't allow enough customization and the preview never has worked. It leaves you with the question - which is worse? An app that loses your work with no warning like this one or the subpar blogger offerings of ADD Google development team. Don't download and I even pays for this crap!
CRASH!
Comments
Post a Comment