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I do not hold myself to a traditional work schedule. Or play schedule, for that matter.  I work when I need to and I play when I want to.  Often, though, work and play are the same thing.  That’s one of the reasons I know I’m doing the right thing with my life, or at least on my way to doing the things I’m meant to do.

I am inspired by many forms of expression, but without fail, I can count on inspiration to hit at around the same time at least three to four nights a week.  It happens on weeknights, which I usually spend alone.  Something happens in the downtime I enjoy once I’ve cleaned up the kitchen, when I sit on the floor, listening to music, Robert Feuille’s flickr feed dancing across my flatscreen.  Occasionally, I find myself nursing a Sunshine Wheat or Shiner Bock, but more recently, a cup of coffee.

Tonight, while I was letting my brain loose, the name Ray Kappe came up.  I don’t know why.  I must have read his name somewhere.  I looked him up on the interwebs and discovered one of the great architects of our time.  As I said earlier, I am inspired by tons of art forms, but the tangible ones, such as architecture, have a stronger impact on me.  This is interesting, considering that I produce video projects.  I love working with video and photography, but with a few exceptions, I don’t find myself as awed by it as I do by other forms of expression.

During my research of Kappe, I stumbled upon a list he wrote when someone asked him what he thought the most important principles were that made him a successful architect, planner and educator.  They are a fantastic set of guidelines for anyone and I plan to practice these as I establish my production company, and of course, throughout my life.  Here they are…

1. Think positively, not negatively.
2. Accept structure but know that it is to be questioned and broken when necessary.
3. Always be willing to explore, experiment and invent.  Do not accept the status quo.
4. Know yourself and keep your work consistent with who you are and how you think.
5. Maintain good moral and social values.
6. Be humble, honest, compassionate, and egalitarian.
7. Have conviction about your work.
8. Be open and say yes to most ideas and requests. The good ones will be valuable, the bad ones will cease to exist.
9. Allow employees and fellow workers freedom and the ability to work to their strengths. Avoid hierarchy.
10. Money should be the residual of work, not the goal.  But do not compromise your worth.

Happy new year.  May your 2010 be as good as mine.

My work habits have always been a little unusual. There’s no telling exactly where this comes from, as my career choice eliminates the ability to have a “normal” life.  Since my early college years, I’ve been working in live television.  I’ve parted ways in recent months with the television environment, but not because of a lack of enthusiasm.  In fact, I love and miss it.  If you’re a success in TV, it’s because you’re working while the majority of America is sitting on their asses at home, watching your work.  That’s just the fact of the matter.

My first job in television (and, by the way, it feels a little weird writing like this.  This was only 5 years ago) had me at the controls of an Ikegami studio camera on the set of News22, the PBS affiliate’s live half-hour newscast for Southern New Mexico.  It was a student production. Students on set and students in the control room. I was really excited to become part of the production.  This was convenient, since it was a requirement for class.

Before long, I was pushed up the food chain. A semester and a half after I started running that camera, I was the one barking commands. I directed the newscast until the semester after I graduated. News22 was nice because I was out the door and heading home at 7:15pm every night.

It was once I became a big part of Aggie Vision that my own priorities took a back seat to what my job needed from me. I didn’t mind though. It felt awesome to be part of a team that was breaking new ground every day.  My teammates were Kyle Doperalski, Brad Faison and Rob Flora.

We put games on regional TV a couple nights a week.  Game days were always a blast.  As the “engineer-in-charge”, I brought it upon myself to try to be the first one on site everyday. Brad beat me to it about half the time. Pulling cable became one of my guilty pleasures.  Nobody with a college degree should get excited to carry hundreds of pounds of stranded copper cable in the form of coax, XLR, DT-12, at Cat-5 up and down stadium stairs at 8am.  I would usually skip class on these days.  Starting the day with a burrito from Pic Quik, working in an hour for a lunch outing with the guys to ChaChi’s or Dick’s (if it was Rob’s turn to choose) and not thinking about anything but putting on a good show until 11pm or midnight made for some very productive days.  To this day, I can’t sit at a sporting event and not watch cameras.

From there, I made my way to central Connecticut. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying “Luke! How could you leave paradise and move to Connecticut?!” Simple. I was wooed by ESPN.  I spent the next year working 5pm to 3:30 in the morning Thursday thru Sunday on SportsCenter. Working these hours required quite an adjustment to my sleep schedule, which, five months after leaving, I haven’t fully recovered from.

Interestingly, every night, 10 pm rolls around and I get an amazing surge of energy which powers me straight through until 2 in the morning.  I like working late. It keeps me perfectly focused on the task at hand.  I know that I wont be missing anything on Facebook or Twitter (which have become a vice), and nobody knows better than me that there’s nothing on TV at such an hour.

I must say, I really like skeleton of a lifestyle that I’m carving out for myself.  It’s different, but it keeps me free to do what I want to do. I’m lacking a social life right now, but that will come in time. No need to rush it.

I drove back to Austin yesterday, after spending the last 22 days editing “The Orchard” in Las Cruces. It’s the movie that I assistant directed earlier in the summer. The whole process was really interesting, especially considering that it was my first time editing RED media.

At times it was a headache, but we were always taken back by the quality of the images.  It honestly felt like film.

The story takes place over the course of nine months, but the script is only 30 pages long.  Our biggest struggle was figuring out how to make it feel like you’ve been through months of trauma in forty minutes or less.  Raj, the director, used “The Shawshank Redemption” as an example, where you feel as though you’ve been behind those bars for years, despite the movie being only a couple hours long.

That’s a common editing dilemma, but it’s a challenge that is exciting to take on.  Editing would be unnecessary if it wasn’t for the vital passage of time.

Before I took on this project, I researched the philosophical implications that you come across though the editing process.  My first stop was reading about Walter Murch- not only one of the greatest editors of our time, but arguably one of the smartest.  The way he speaks about the process gets me excited to start cutting every time I read or listen to it.

One of the things Murch says is that three stories are made throughout the production.  First, the writer scripts the story he imagines, using locations that may or may not exist and dreaming up whatever he or she thinks is necessary to get the characters to their destination.

The second story is the directors execution of the script.  Using the writers vision as an outline, he will do what he can to materialize what’s on paper.  Of course, compromises will usually have to be made due to a small budget, non-existent locations, etc.

The third story is the one the editor pieces together.  More importantly, it’s the one that everyone sees.  The editor has the ability to totally change the story.  While editing “The Orchard”, I found myself scouring every frame of a take, looking for a certain expression out of an actor, sometimes even rolling before the slate enters the shot, or before the director calls “cut”, until I found what I needed.

Anyways, I’m even more fired up about feature editing now.  This experience has me very excited about looking for other opportunities.

Bye.

Guess what?! I just figured out why my blog doesn’t always work. As soon as I launch Mail on my home computer, the blog goes down. I think it might be because there are too many processes on the server, and since I have six secured e-mail addresses on that server, PHP is the first to go.

Any theories?

Alright, reader, I’m back online.  I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but I am.  Ever since I last posted to the blog, on June 6th, I haven’t been able to access it.  It’s been very strange and over my head, as I’m about as knowledgeable with PHP as I am with general chemistry (D+, Spring 2004).  Despite the total lack of a compositional outlet, for over a month I was not bothered by the fact that I couldn’t make a post.  I sat back and just let the blog become but a memory.  That is, until yesterday, when I was itching to put my words heartily within your field of view.

So, I posted a tweet:

Who wants to help me figure out why my wp blog isn’t working? www.lukewilbanks.com/blog/ All files are present…

The only response I got was a joke from my friend @DavyArnold, who offered that my web site crashed because he boarded an airplane.  So the truth is, I don’t know how it’s working.  I asked, and I received.  And that’s good enough for me.

Alright enough about that topic.  So far this blog post is reminding me of the majority of Twitter conversations, which typically revolve around how best to use Twitter.  Is it just me, or is this totally counter-productive?  It’s like you and I having an in-depth conversation about how best to have conversations, and then repeating this exchange everyday.

Stand by for a topic change.

In June, I went back to my college stomping grounds for a few weeks to witness some of my best friends, Erik and Juliane, get hitched.  A great experience with fun times had by all.  They were lucky enough to have the most handsome groomsman this side of the wall between my living room and home office.

After the wedding, I stuck around Las Cruces for another couple weeks to take part in a movie shoot.  I was asked to be Assistant Director, which was an amazing, thought-provoking and eye-opening experience.  The independent short film is called “The Orchard“, directed by Rajeev Nirmalakhandan, who had the honor of my presence in his teaching debut, when he taught Advanced Editing at New Mexico State.

It was a six day shoot, which we had to extend to six and a half due to inclement weather.  Now, in no particular order, the highlights of the experience:

• We shot on the RED camera system, thanks to my new, and probably unknowingly generous friend, Charlie Kuttner.
• We got a Steadicam operator named Ron Vidor.  Ron was very helpful, and needless to say, he got us some stellar “ROCKY III” and “ER” Season 1 caliber shots on his Steadicam.
• The entire community was really helpful and excited to be part of the process.  We got so much stuff donated, it doubled our production value.  Not to mention our 60 extras that spent their entire Sunday in a pecan orchard. Speaking of which, a big thanks to the Salopeks.
• Of course, the awesome cast and crew that came together for this was unbeatable.  I can’t wait till the next time I get to work with them again.

“I wasn’t born in Austin, but I got here as fast as I could”.

Those words were written on a bumper sticker I saw yesterday, and it concisely sums up my feelings about my recent relocation.

Twenty days ago I decided that it was time to get serious about my career.  That meant that I needed to take control of the steering wheel, kick ESPN out of the driver’s seat, and move to the city that was going to offer me the best chance to launch a successful career in a field I am passionate about: film and video production.

Eighteen days is how long it took for me to resign from my job, find an apartment, drive everything I own 1,993 miles in a total travel time of 31 hours. I guess you could say I attacked my new plan with a vengeance. 

Now I’m in the first place I’ve wanted, or even felt I could call home in over a year. So, now that I’ve done the hard work, it’s time to get to the fun stuff. Job search time.

Hey there, strangers.

I bet, if you do a search on every blogging service, the most common topic is along the lines of “sorry I haven’t written here in a while”.

Why apologize? There’s no reason for me to apologize. Thus far in the life of this blog, I have offered little to my two documented readers. I can understand how certain bloggers feel guilty when they fail to keep their throngs of readers up-to-date on their latest adventures. I’m not that type of writer.

This has been an especially eventful [for better or for worse] couple of weeks.

At the end of February, I visited home.  Home is El Paso, Texas. The Pass to the North, as it’s been coined. While I was down there, I found out that one of our generation’s great photographers, my future work partner, and my friend, Robert, was diagnosed with testicular cancer. This was devastating news. But it was all the motivation I needed to visit him in my favorite city: Austin, Texas, the place Robert calls home. After my week in El Paso, I flew back to Connecticut, put in four days of work, jumped back on a plane and spent another week at the live music capital of the world.

It was a huge relief to see Robert doing alright, albeit, stuck in a hospital bed, temporarily bed-ridden, only had one ball… I could go on. His amazing sense of humor and awesomely faithful outlook on life were as strong as ever.

That happened to be SXSW interactive week, so my brother Ben and I treated ourselves to a few staples of Austin culture. We saw Bob Schneider rock at Antone’s, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht get sloshed during their live DiggNation at Stubb’s, and listened to Milkdrive (South Austin Jug Band’s alter ego) jam at the Elephant Room. I also hung out with Robert’s brothers Joe and Jimmy, my friend Alana and the rest of my Austin family. A great week, despite the hardships.

When I arrived back in Connecticut, I found out that my uncle Jimmy had been diagnosed with Primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma. That was after he was incorrectly diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma, a much weaker and more penurious form of cancer. He’s currently at MD Anderson in Houston. As of right now, we don’t know much else. All I do know is that we don’t call him Rattlesnake Jim for nothing. This is the dude that busts into burning buildings to rescue women of the night and their, um, clients in his spare time. He spent years searching for gold mines in Mexico with an AK-47 slung across his back, and he prevents helicopters from tumbling off the edge of mountaintops by using his own body as a counterweight. All I’m saying is that, this is no hill for a climber.

Sprinkled throughout those trips, I am leading a group of people from work to start brainstorming ideas for a short film which I will direct in the next few weeks.

Throughout all of this, I’m searching for the next step in my career. More on that later. Crazy times.

I haven’t posted here in a while.  I’ve been too busy not getting accepted to Grad school.  I’m bummed, but I knew all along that the chances of me getting in to the Radio, Television & Film department at UT Austin were very slim.  They accept 12 people per year, and I’m sure they are all stellar applicants.  

I was expecting their admission decision to be mailed to me.  I imagined setting the sealed envelope on the table, staring at it and contemplating for an hour whether to open it, knowing full well that the words written inside would determine the course of my life for the next three years and ultimately have a resounding impact on my entire career- or not.  

Instead, I got an email.  I was sitting at work on Thursday, doing instant replay for a lame college basketball game when my iPhone buzzed, alerting me that I had something to take me away from reality for at least a few seconds.  I slid my finger across the screen and was indicated that five new emails had made their way into my inbox. Glancing through the subject lines I saw that I had a few new Twitter followers and some junk mail.  My eyes dilated when I saw a subject line that read “UT Admission”.  I opened it, fully expecting it to be an indication of when I should expect an admission decision.  Instead, the following statement sat there, staring at me: 

Dear Luke,

We have concluded our review of applications for the Master of Fine Arts in Film & Video Production program at The University of Texas at Austin.  We regret that we are unable to offer you admission for Fall 2009.  
 
The applicants for our program were exceptionally competitive this year, resulting in many well-qualified applicants being turned away.  Our decisions are the result of an extensive review of all the applications and supporting materials, assessing qualifications as well as the fit for our program.
 
We wish you well in your future pursuits. Thank you again for your interest in our program.
 
Sincerely,
 
[Name Omitted]
Graduate Adviser

The sixty most watched minutes of football for the entire year wrapped up a couple hours ago. Being an employee of ESPN, you might think that I had a vested interest in the game. It might surprise you, if you don’t know me, that I am much more interested in the rich little morsels of capitalism that are sprinkled throughout the evenings main attraction. I say rich because NBC sold tonight’s sixty-nine prime time spots for $100,000 per second.

So, Budweiser bought a bunch of ad time during the Super Bowl, and actually became a major sponsor. For example, they were responsible for the aerial photography that was used sparingly as a scene-set, or “in bump”, as we call it in the business. A contingency of Budweiser’s substantial airtime purchases was that no other major brewery be allowed to buy time during the Super Bowl block between 6:00p and 11:00p.

This ended up being an issue for Budweiser’s strict competition, Miller, which obviously saw some advertising potential. Now, I don’t know the first thing about buying or selling advertising time, but I think that Miller’s solution to this predicament was pretty clever. Instead of buying ad time from the GE-owned national NBC office, they bought time from hundreds of independently-owned NBC affiliates across the country.

As if that isn’t clever enough, Miller broke new ground with the length of the ads. While every other agency is trying extend their clients’ commercial TRT, Miller’s concept was to shorten their spots down to one second.

So, not only did Miller spend substantially less on their air time, but their relatively simple concept probably saved their company a couple million bucks.  And 90 percent of the country still saw the spots.

Now that is problem solving.

Here’s a link [fixed] to the slew of 1 and 5 second commercials from Miller.