Always Wear Clean Underwear: Golden Rules are Golden for a Reason!

During the Digital Days Conference that I attended in February at the Electronic Arts Campus in Burnaby, British Columbia, Claùde Parè was the opening speaker on the first day… and let me tell you; he helped start the conference off with a bang!

His talk was called, The Rules of Cinema: Rated ‘R’… and he was just amazing!

Now, as you may have gleaned in previous posts, I’m a big fan of Jessica Sitomer‘s seminars that she gives here in Vancouver each year.  She travels everywhere, so take a look and see if she is coming to talk in your area.  One of the things Jessica says when going for a job interview is, “When some one asks, ‘How do you feel you excel at your job?’, find a way to tell them by using a story about you doing your job.”  Draw the people in around you with more than just an, ‘Oh, I think I am great organizer’.  You could say, “On Tron I had the challenge of bringing multiple departments together each morning before the cast arrived to start the process of getting dressed.  The specialty costume took an hour or longer from start to finish to dress the cast and once on, they were a challenge to remove quickly. A Sound Assist was needed to wire the suit before we started testing of the lighting systems and a costume tech was needed to asst sound…”

“Fears Are Paper Tigers”

I attended a seminar last weekend with Jessica Sitomer, The Greenlight coach. Yes, I have talked about her before. Her seminars are worth going to and, yes, I will be there again next year so I will probably often be spouting her wisdom. After all… learning lessons from others is my main reason for writing this blog, ne pas?

She talked about the ‘spiral-down’ effect that we can go into when we are out of work. Funnily enough I had been sitting on the grass chatting with some costumers the other day, and one of the things that came up was the set funk that comes at the end of every show. This lead me to thinking about the last day of shooting on my previous show when everybody was getting all misty and saying how great the show was and they were sad it was ending.