(Yep I have slept for almost five hours; fucking feel great!)
How is the Fest going? Honestly, I thought you loved doing what you do, (your real enjoyment, not what forces you to work against your will) but I am sorry about all the incompetent producers, each one vying for an award of some kind. As you work, you are denied you ability to make the best of the night, right?
I QUIT music production because of NOT being able to control a room, but your room is YOURS!! Just do whot you know and stand watch to keep your work safe from daily interlopers.
Watch for the Rescue Bat!
I used to love running 35mm shows, and 70mm, of course, but all that is mostly gone, replaced by digital images from hard drives. The job is now that of an IT technician's, with some traces of a projectionist's work description. There's still the matter of projecting an image and making sure that it uses the correct aspect ratio, and there's still a Dolby processor and room equalisation and all that.
But mostly it's about inserting hot-swap drives and uploading files to a server, about building shows by dragging and dropping things in a graphical user interface, and about clicking Play using a touchpad.
The job is not what it was. There is no challenge, nothing to hold your interest for any significant period of time.
What is unchanged--or perhaps worse these days, since films are cheaper to make now than they used to be--is the uninterrupted flow of morons passing through my projection booth. The filmmakers, who seldom know anything but think their films are more important than peace in the middle east, the mixers who actually sometimes know something but only too rarely trust that others might know how to do their jobs, too, and, finally, the festival workers who only very rarely know anything but think what they do is important.
If the work was still about 35 mm prints and the art and science of producing beautiful images, perhaps I'd be better able to ignore the morons. As things stand, I am infinitely bored and therefore spend my time being sarcastic.
I should have posted this in the let off some steam thread.