Greetings loyal readers,
My apologies for the egregious absence in updates. I’d make the predictable excuse of being colossally busy, but being predictable is terrible, so instead I’ll tell you the reason I haven’t written in so long is because I was stuck in a Groundhog-Day-like time vortex for three weeks, forced to live Mothers’ Day over and over again until I got it right (note for those interested: giving your mom an Egg McMuffin and one of your delinquent student loan bills as gifts is not an acceptable way to start the day).
Now that I am thankfully free from my purgatorial reality loop, I can get back to my normal work life, which currently not only means handing out heaping servings of sass and intrigue in this blog, but also sorting through all the collected media from PROMOTIONS EAST.
The show itself was excellent. We had a great distributor turnout and the handful of exhibitors I spoke with were thrilled with the foot traffic they had. I say handful because at PROMOTIONS EAST I wasn’t able to devote my usual amount of time to meeting people and catching up with contacts and sources. Instead, I was tied up with taking photos and filming product demos from the show floor.
The video interviews are obviously an awesome idea, and are going to be really great for the Web site, but unfortunately and somewhat hilariously, I know next to nothing about editing digital film. Imagine going back in time, giving a cave man a helicopter and telling him, in a language he obviously doesn’t speak, to collect the purest snow from the peak of Mount Everest. With producing these videos, I am said cave man, except instead of a benevolent time-traveler giving me instructions I have a 2,000 page PDF user manual full of glowing prose like, “Unlike drag-to-Timeline editing, three-point editing allows you to use both source clip and sequence In and Out points to specify the duration of a source clip and where it should be placed in a sequence.” One sentence, 37 of the most boring words. Fantastic.
Still, as far as cave men go, I’m fairly clever. There’s a good chance I’ll be able to figure all this out, or at least there’s a slightly better chance of victory compared to me falling into a tar pit or being eaten by a saber-tooth tiger. So join me next week, where I’ll either be recounting a great intellectual triumph, or telling an endearing and whimsical story about how I threw my iMac out our office window for a 12-story drop then cried for five hours while eating a pint of Cherry Garcia.
CHARLES PYLTER FACT OF THE WEEK: A good chunk of the Promo Marketing team was eating lunch at the Tun Tavern during PROMOTIONS EAST, and Charlie had this hardcore dad moment of being excited for a power-tool commercial that was playing on one of the TVs. It was for a new kind of Sawz-all [link], and Charlie glowingly recounted to me an anecdote about how nice his own jigsaw is. Being a cave man who really prefers big rocks or sharpened sticks as tools, I think I stared blankly at him for 10 seconds before he gave up and turned to someone who has conversational skills beyond “Oooh, fire … .”
