The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP002: Assistants

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

The role of an assistant in postproduction has changed a lot over the past couple of decades.  In this episode of the Offset Podcast Robbie & Joey share their thoughts on the evolution of the postproduction assistant, what skills assistants should learn, and what employers should look out for.

Hey there. Welcome back to another installment of the Offset Podcast. I'm Robert Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Joey, this week we're talking about something that we get asked about quite often. And that is, how do I become an assistant in post-production? Stay tuned. Hey, guys, welcome back. You know, Joey, when I was a younger person, let's just put it that way, without revealing my elevated age. A long time ago. Elevated age these days. You know, post-production, was very much so a master, apprentice, or operator, kind of assistant kind of thing, right? You know, as an assistant, I remember that one of the facilities I first worked at, there was probably another 15, you know, or so folks that were, you know, air quotes,

assistants doing various things around the facility. And I figured, you know, this is a good topic to talk about because, you know, we get asked at least, you know, a couple times a month from, you know, whether it's cold calls or cold emails, or at conferences or wherever like, hey, how do I get started with what you guys do? Or how do I get started in editorial or VFX or whatever? And, you know, I think it's just a, it's a hard topic to really kind of give somebody like, you know,

a one-liner kind of advice because it's difficult these days. And it's different than when we were kind of coming up in the industry, you know, 20, 25 years ago. And it's something that I think we should just explore a little bit and talk about in this episode because I think there are places and people that do kind of the assistant, you know, pipeline really well. I think there are certain people that do it poorly and make that assistant kind of burnout and never want to be in this industry in general, right? And then I think there's, you know, some stuff that we can talk about when it comes to the assistant itself, their attitude, what they're expected to do, you know, that kind of stuff.

But where I want to get started was kind of just a brief history of, you know, in our 20 or 25 years each and, post-production, kind of what that evolution of the assistant looks like. And you being someone that literally grew up in a post house, I kind of wanted to get your take first on kind of what has been the evolution of the assistant, where, you know, traditionally, where do they do? Where were they? And that kind of stuff. So why don't you start us off? Yeah. So like you said, I grew up in a post house. My dad was a broadcast engineer and I started out in the post house very early in the days of linear tape to tape online. That was kind of where I got into the post-production business, specifically online in linear rooms. And in those workflows, the assistant was not just

a convenience for the operator, right? The assistant was an absolute necessity because you had people running back and forth between tape rooms, the equipment room, and the edit suite. You had people that needed to type everything manually on your character generator. If you wanted things to appear on the screen. And there were so many different devices in that edit suite that needed to be operated that, one, you needed an assistant. Otherwise, you would just be there all day trying to run five different machines. And two, it was a great opportunity for the assistant to learn so many different pieces of technology and how they go together because you're bouncing around to so many different disciplines from maybe operating the edit controller,

maybe operating a switcher, maybe operating the Kiron, maybe operating tape decks, doing signal routing, even helping clients with whatever they needed so the session could keep running. It was really a kind of catch-all

for the entire post-production environment in one room. And once we moved out of linear and into non-linear, some of those aspects stuck with it, especially when we were still in non-linear in tape world, where we might have been doing an offline

in a nonlinear room bringing everything in from tape and then bringing it all in from tape at higher resolution and then as basically tool sets got more and more concentrated right you go from

my linear suite that had five different pieces of technology in it all talking to each other to one non-linear system like resolve or smoke or flame or any of the others that are out there now that is a suite of tools all on one desk

and that's where it gets really, really hard for assistance to find a place where they're useful and more importantly for people that have assistance to find really useful things for their assistants to do that aren't just menial work.

That's the downside of being an assistant and also the kind of the hard part of if you're there to be an assistant to learn, which I think is really valid, it's hard if all of your tasks are kind of the same menial thing.

Right. You need to spread out. And that's really the responsibility of the person who has the assistant, who hires the assistant, to make sure they're spreading their usefulness and their knowledge around. And it's a kind of educational tool. You don't want an assistant to stay an assistant forever. Well, there's a lot to unpack from what you just said.

So for those of you who might not be familiar with some of the things like character generators, still stores, edit controllers. Yes, Joey has one of all of those things somewhere in his workshop in his basement. you're right those rooms were first of all I just remember at being a 20 something year old you know young 21 22 year old person

walking into those rooms and there was always just this like vibe in those rooms of just like there was so much going on right and yeah imagine every panel in your software being its own box with a keyboard and a screen yeah exactly the desks were gigantic

you know there was there was seating for you know not just like client comfortable seating there was you know eight or nine the arians or whatever rolling around the floor because you know people had to come to different parts of the desk to do different things and there was just I remember there being just a lot of movement too because it's sort of like a lot of that stuff you know the actual machines tape decks etc wasn't housed in the actual suite itself it was housed in a central machine room so a lot of times like depending on the facility right you either had like a kind of a shortcut back door in the

room to the to the core to the machine room other times I remember I worked at one place where it was like all the way at the other end of the building and it was like no easy way to get there. So, I mean, if I had a, you know, a watch back then tracking my steps, it would have been, you know, 10,000 a day, easy going back and forth between the rooms. But I think you're right. There was a lot, you know, going on in those rooms, a lot of things that one single person couldn't do. But I want to speak to also to the experience of being in that room as a young person trying to get, you know, sort of the knowledge. And it kind of hits on something I want to explore that you just mentioned, but I'll first give you my feeling. I remember walking in that.

room the first time, again, just being a little impressed by the, just, you know, the Starship Enterprise kind of feel to the room. But two, being intimidated a F, man, just like, you know, it was one of those things, especially, you know, here in the D.C. area, as you know, where we do a lot of political work and things are moving very fast. It just, I saw so many people enter these rooms as assistants and got beat down really quick, right? Because they weren't, they, you know, they spent two seconds to look at something else and the whole edit passed them by, right? And it was like, what are you doing, man? Why didn't you push that button? I told you to, you know, punch in the Chiron right there or, you know, execute the still store or whatever, right? Um, it, I remember the

feeling being one as, yes, I'm learning something, but also very much a trial by fire kind of situation, right? Where you're thrown into this room and oftentimes, you know, the clients of those days were always in the room, right? So if you screwed something up, you spelled something up, you spelled something wrong in the Kiron or you did whatever. It was instantaneous. What are you doing? I don't like this kid. Get out of, you know, get them out of here. Get a new kid in here kind of thing. And so I just remember the feeling of being impressed, but also just really tense all the time in those rooms just because it was sort of like, uh, and I, but what I really remember is the times when the clients were not in those rooms. And I tell you why, because that was where the people that I were working with, the operators, the editor,

later, you know, the colorist or whatever, that's when they could actually take the time to kind of give you that institutional knowledge, that inside baseball kind of thing, be like, hey, I know what you're doing, it's the right way to do it, but you can save five steps if you do it like this. But more importantly, what I remember from that period of time of being assistant is also just, like, the art of running a room, too. because even more so than we do now, you know,

we talk about this often with our colleagues and our, you know, our friends and, you know, audience members and stuff about how important it is to run a room. Not only was the operator back then

running the room for the sake of, you know, appearances for the client, they were like, you know, they were like the lieutenant or captain or whatever,

you know, in their unit at the army, kind of commanding and operating everybody else to do their job and making sure it all synced up. And I think back on some of those,

those early days, I still, to these days, respect those editors that were in those rooms because not only they're doing something creative, they're also managing the client, as well as managing, you know, two or three, you know, 20 somethings in the room, just getting their feet under them how to do that. And the last thing I remember about that time period is how much I found that being a, you know, kind of a yes person and kind of ingratiating yourself, I became like, you know, oh, well, we're booked on this, I want Rob in the room with me kind of thing. And I'm sure you experienced that something.

Like as you got better, you became, you weren't, you know, quite the operator yet, but you were the trusted assistant, right? And that meant more stick time, more learning the techniques, but more importantly, more face time with the clients that, you know, five, ten years later would then come in the room with you because they're like, oh, yeah, I've worked with, you know, Joey or Rob or whatever since, you know, they were a kid kind of thing. So it's good. I wanted to ask you, though, do you think that now where we are in 2023, 2024, that the assistant role is still a thing?

Or do you think that it is just, it's withered on the vine and people who are assistant editors, colorists, et cetera, are just there because maybe some old school nostalgia? I have some opinions on this, but I'm curious about what you think. Yeah, I think it's a much tough. world to get into post-production these days. You know, we were really, really lucky to get into this business at the time we did. Because like you said, that assistant operator relationship was the best possible learning experience. And it wasn't just learning, hey, this is what this button does or even the creative side. This is what makes an image look good. This is what makes an edit look good. It is, this is how you navigate the client relationships in this business that will be

your entire career forever, right? The intangible skills that go into managing a room full of people, which was how it was done back then, like you said, but those skills carry over to managing a gigantic email chain today with clients that are remote in different locations and coordinating teams and coordinating different aspects from editors to colorists to audio mixers. The skills that we learned being in online rooms 20 years ago are, I think, so. important to the modern world, but there's not really a good training ground for those skills anymore because that old kind of assistant is not necessary anymore. So now you have assistants

who are either a getting just menial work, right? Like I was saying earlier, just, hey, go in and track all these shots. You know how to track shots? Good. I put power windows on everything. Track everything for me. Yep. You're not going to learn much doing that. You'll help you'll help the colorist and you will get paid a rate for doing that work, but it's not going to advance your career. So the hard thing, and I think about this a lot because, like I said, I feel very fortunate to have been brought up by some honestly incredibly talented artists that were just hugely generous with their time. I like to think I've had a pretty successful career. I credit the early mentors that I had in that post house with that career 100%. I would be nowhere without them.

So trying to figure out how to do that to the next generation in a modern world where everything is decentralized. Everything is obviously nonlinear. I mean, part of it is doing things like the podcast that we're doing right now, right? We're trying to just talk to people out there with our experiences that they might never have. And hopefully some of it is helpful. But yeah, I honestly don't know the answer to where does the assistant fit in the... in the current ecosystem. So I've thought a lot about this,

just in prep of recording this, but also just in general over the past couple years. And I think there's a couple things at play. So I think number one, that it's so easy for us to forget now, but, you know, 20, 25 years ago, there wasn't anywhere else to get access to the equipment, right? Yes.

So that was the only, if you wanted to, you know, use the equipment, you had to go through this pipeline of being a citizen. You know, now you buy a laptop, you buy, you know, an activation code and you're you know whether it's audio vfx color edit whatever you're off to the races with whatever tools that you want so it's it's you know that that that generally used term of democratization is good thing it's great for getting more people access to higher end pieces of

software and hardware but it has been derogatory or you know bad for people in the sense that you know they're not having to go somewhere interact with people learn and you know and and build themselves up of that. But I also think it's a different thing for different parts of our industry, right? So I think a lot of, you know, so I think of our industry kind of being maybe three or four, maybe five different tiers, right? So there's kind of sort of the editorial tier, right? Telling stories, putting together edits. There is the, you know, the audio side of things, which is actually multiple disciplines within that, whether that's fully, whether that's sound design, whether that's mixing or whatever, you know, there's color and finishing, which again, multiple disciplines in there,

you know, true colorist or making DCPs or, you know, whatever. And then, you know, kind of some somewhat overlap VFX, right, whether that's true compositing visual effects work, or whether it's more simple stuff that you might do in the, in the context of, you know, a finishing, you know, editorial or finishing color kind of pipeline. And I think those different places get different results when it comes to their assistants, right? I think that a lot of episodic TV, certainly a lot of feature films, couldn't be made without assistant editors, right? Because they're doing things like, hey, here's 50 terabytes of footage. I want you to spin through that and pull selects from that so when I come in tomorrow, I can start cutting that scene. And organize it. And organize

exactly. That's a great way to learn critical organizational skills. Right. Put it in a bit. Put it in a bit. put it into bins, get it organized, whatever. And I think also that that editorial assistant pipeline also seems to eventually progress to where that there is like kind of a little bit of a cast system within the editorial assistants, right? Where when you're on the top of the deck in the editorial assistants, that's when you start cutting your own scenes together, right, and handling, you know, doing string outs. So when the editor, the actual editor comes in, you know, they're not starting from scratch. they're looking at your work, refining your work, etc. In the audio world, I see a lot of analogies to the editorial side of things where I know,

at least from the audio folks that we've dealt with, you know, they'll do things like, hey, all I need you to do is dialogue cleanup, right? Where, you know, you're just going through and cutting out S's and chuzz and whatever at the end of things. Next level up from that is doing some sound design to where, you know, maybe some Foley, and then you finally progress to doing your own mixes. And it's the same thing with editorial, right? you might do a rough mix of a scene for a more seasoned operator approved.

In the world of color, I actually think that's where it's a little the most complicated, but I have one thing to add to this that I don't think that Black Magic in particular did this on purpose. Because in a lot of color workflows, those same thing with editorial and audio, there have been similar things, right? As you mentioned earlier, go track the window or make the outputs or, you know, probably more times than often, do the conform for me, you know, do all the busy work that was there. Black Magic, I think, actually made this a little more, again, democratized for assistance because sort of of the segmentation that the app itself has, right?

So for a smaller production company, like there might be things in Resolve that I just don't like to do, or I'm not, maybe they're not my strongest area, right? I might say to somebody, oh, you're good at Fusion, well, go paint out all those, license plates for me, right? Now, traditionally, that might have been another vendor, another person I've hired, you know, a visual effects person. But now that this one in this app that, you know, a lot of people use, we included has that segmentation. I think that does offer opportunities for more in the color world for more varied kind of things. But I do think it's a complicated thing with color. I'll get back to it in one second. And lastly, with visual

effects, man, I just don't know how that segmentation and visual effects is, uh, works all that well, mainly because lack of knowledge, but also just because it is so complex and tedious sometimes that I wonder how Visual Effects Studios kind of segment that work. Sure, it can be, you know, basic things like, hey, I need you to build these mats, or I need you to, you know, do, um, organizational level things, whatever. But I do think there's ream to the segment, but let me ask you this, Joey, because you've been on the end of this, how much of a role, no matter which industry or segment you're in or how you're getting assistant, does the make or break success of being an assistant depend on the person that's the mentor or the operator?

I think it depends completely. I think if you are going to bring on an assistant, part of that implied relationship is, yes, assistants don't make as much money as, you know, people billing full rate for their services. Right. And part of that tradeoff of if you're going to be hired as an assistant, probably not making as much money as if you were hired as a full artist or operator, there needs to be something else to make up that difference. And it is career development and education. Yep.

Right. It is the responsibility fully of the artist's hiring an assistant to make sure that it's worth it to them to be the assistant, right? Yes, I'm making a little bit less money, but I am learning so much from this person. And if they have a good attitude towards teaching and being helpful and tolerating mistakes, Like you said, in those rooms with clients, sometimes if you messed up, that was the end of it.

Or you got yelled at and you felt completely out of place. You know, people got real serious about this stuff. Like, you know, it was life and death, not making TV commercials. What are you mean? You didn't do an insert. You did an assemble? What? Yeah, you know, you didn't turn pre-read on.

You just ruined the whole thing. You know, obviously there's different levels of mistakes. Sure. But if you are bringing someone on as an assistant, you need to be ready to tolerate mistakes and convert mistakes into learning opportunities. And I think it's defining what is needed. I see so many people, first of all, I don't believe in the idea of like free internship, free assistant kind of thing. If you're going to hire somebody to be your assistant, treat them like a professional, pay them, right? And actually have a plan.

Like I see so many assistant relationships ruined by, I don't know, the kid just sits there in the room. day and looks at his phone. That's not the kid's fault, dude. That's that's the operator's fault, not having a goal and having a plan. The other mistake that I see that's related to that is, from a lot of these people, is not having the trust factor to let them actually do real work, right? And then it becomes like, well, if I, you know, you hear these people say this all time, well, like, I don't want to have to go back and just redo all their work for the sake of doing it. Like, to me, that's like, what's the point then? Why even entertain having an assistant if you're not and let them... Some of the time, for some tasks and some instances, having the assistant means,

yes, they mess it up, you have to redo it. Sometimes it means more hours for you. As long as the relationship results in a net of teamwork, right? If the total net amount of hours is reduced by having that help, you need to be able to respect that this assistant's going to make mistakes. You're going to need to help them fix them. And at some point, it might take more of your time, not less. Well, I think maybe it's because we have a background in education, but I like to think about the assistant thing as like, you know, giving them a syllabus of like, okay, here are the milestones. So here's like what we're going to try to accomplish, you know. And it might start off with, you know, number one thing. I have a pile of media that I just need you to organize into logical bins.

Like can't really screw that up too bad, right? Or I need to copy, you know, stuff from point A to point B or whatever. And then progress as it goes up. But like communication. Yeah. If you jump in day one, say, hey, I need you to rode over. all these shots for me super precise. You're setting them up for failure.

Right. But being communicating that clearly and having like an actual plan that is communicated to that person like, hey listen, I know that you want to be sitting here doing exactly what I'm doing. But that's a year from now. Right. And that really reminds me of something because earlier you mentioned the technological aspect of how this new kind of modern democratization of software and hardware has kind

of brought more people in. Yeah. I think if you look at modern. workflows, especially, you know, modern post-COVID workflows, we've got an opportunity here to bring assistance back. Earlier, I was saying I kind of don't really always see how an assistant fits. Well, guess what? Now you've got Blackmagic cloud. You've got cloud databases. You've got various different cloud sinking solutions to really shrink the world geographically. You have services like LucidLink that is bringing on different, you know, regions to where they can act like they're in the same room together. you know, utilizing that technology to bring on assistance and bring them up where they could be

in their living room somewhere five states away, but almost feel like they were in the room with you. That's not something technologically that we've had up until pretty recently. And I think we're still seeing how that's going to evolve. But I think the new internet-based collaboration technologies that are coming really into full-force post-COVID are the biggest opportunity for assistance to be developed and to learn and to get into the industry that we've seen in a long time. Well, to add to that, and then I'll have another point is that I think the beauty of that, too, is, you know, for the longest time, you're looking, you know, people like us have been looking in our own geographic pond for people to bring in. And that what you just said,

really expands that possibility out dramatically by like saying, you know, listen, this is the most qualified person, but they live in, you know, whatever. Kalamazoo or whatever and yeah that's the person we want to work with we have internet we have the technology to do this and like you know let's let's train them up but but the thing I was going to say and that goes along with the technological innovation is that without a shadow of a doubt the 20 year old person or 22 year old just graduating from college is I mean leaps and bounds in most cases more technologically advanced with the tools than I think you know that you one of us was maybe at me especially at 20 or 22 because again at the time you had to go

to the facility there was one one million dollar room right getting access to that was dude don't don't freaking bring your coffee in here or your soda or whatever like there was none of that I am shocked by how many kids do things in these tools various tools that I'm like wow how do you do that So it begs the question, or the observation, I should say, that being an assistant is only one part the technical stuff, right? It's really only one part like, yeah, okay, this is how you balance something, okay, this is how you shot match something, or, you know, in the case of editorial, this is how you flow, whatever technical thing you want to bring out. I think that's really only one part of it. The more challenging thing now that I think than the technology is all the around the edges soft stuff, right? it's very difficult to teach somebody, oh, the room just got awkward, right?

How do I deal with the room just got awkward? Or the Zoom call just got awkward. Right. How do I deal with the uncomfortableness of this now without actually physically being there? And so the client communication, the awkwardness, you know, all that kind of stuff, I think that, you know, is, again, trial by fire that a lot of people have gone through. And that is where I see a lot of challenges. I'll give you an example.

10, probably 10 or 12 years ago, I had hired an assistant that lasted about three months. They were good. Technically very good. And I was like, listen, you're ready to do your first session. It was like an easy, you know, like seven or eight shot kind of, you know, I don't know, PSA or something. It wasn't anything highbrow was, you know, balance it, get out the door. And this person decided to do what I'll just call a head.

heavy-handed kind of look, right? And so the night before, like, what do you think about this? And I was like, eh, I don't think it's the right thing for the spot. I would come in, you know, again, I'm not wanting to take over as the opera, because that's another important thing. You want to let people kind of fail on their own. I just simply gave the advice of I would have something else a little bit more vanilla prepared as like, hey, I tried this. And if it hits, great. If not, you're not scrambling. And this person, when the client came in, watched the, their version of this spot was like, dude, what are we doing? This is not the, you know, whatever, the matrix or whatever. You know, turn around and be like, well, I'm the colorist.

I know better than you, the client, right? And I see a lot of that thing, you know, and they were eventually put in their place and it worked out and they went on to bigger and better things. They moved to New York and all sorts of stuff. But I see that kind of thing being way more pervasive now when the feedback loop, the criticism loop, the awkwardness, as we just described, in the room is not there when you can hide behind a computer screen, right? And hide behind not having to do this stuff live. And so to me, the biggest challenge in the new world of assistants is how to get them to fail in a graceful way in a move the ball forward learning way that is really difficult

to do. And I don't know, you've probably experienced something with similar watching people in that situation. It's a challenge. I've been in that situation. I can remember around 20 years ago, arrogant me being really upset when somebody told the management that they didn't want me around certain really high-profile clients because of the way I acted. And I thought I was the hottest thing in the world and I was personally insulted by that. And then years go by and I realized I wouldn't have wanted how I was acting and how I was communicating in the room with that high end of a client. and it was completely right

and they saved me some big embarrassment by managing me as a junior correctly. Right. And so I think in this world that we exist in now, this remote, everybody's democratized with their tools, I still think that, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine down in Austin, Texas, the other day, and it was talking about the roles of assistance and stuff a little bit,

because they've gone through a number of them this year and kind of complaining a little bit about how this, part of it is challenging, especially with people being remote, you know, two or three, you know, four days a week kind of thing. I think that this, again, all comes back to the syllabus of the operator, right? Yeah. And that sense is like, listen, it's going to be important in your development that you're going to have to come in and be in a supervised session with us, whatever that time period is, once a week, twice a month, whatever it be. And at first, you're just going to sit there and say nothing and do nothing and just observe. But like building

that kind of thing in, I also think the one thing that a lot of operators, And I think I've been there. I know you've probably been there as well, is that we have a tendency, because I think that we get crapped on so often by clients, we have a tendency, I think, to be extra craptastic to assistants in terms of critiquing their work. And that can be a real deflater to somebody who is just kind of getting started. Like, it is really a life skill to learn. And Joe, you and I talk about this in our professional work every day, where I'm like, still, at 45 years old, I still get, like, my feelings.

Although we weren't saying how old we were. Right. That's true. I still get hurt sometimes by comment. And you're like, dude, it's not that bad. They're just asking you to, like, you know, saturate a little bit more or whatever. And I'm like, oh, like, but can you imagine not knowing a whole lot, not having the experience that, you know, one of us has or, you know, other people who are growing up in the industry. And then, and going and being like, oh, you know what?

I just, my heart was just broken because my mentor, my, you know, the, you know, the, you know, The person that's supposed to be leading me just totally destroyed the work that I did and was aggressive. I think that there is a place for being a little bit of a hard ass. But I think, again, going back to my syllabus thing, it's all about the delivery and what, in making sure the person knows it. Like, you know, even if that's like something like role playing, be like, you know what, dude, I know this is not my ammo, but I'm going to sit on this couch and I'm going to be a real, real, real, real. difficult person to you, right? I think a lot of, and I know that you don't follow a lot of professional sports, but I think about these stories that Tiger Woods, you know, professional golfer tells all the time about his dad when he was a kid. You know, he'd be preparing for a shot and his

dad would be sitting behind him with change in a pocket, you know, jiggling the change in his pocket, or his dad would do, you know, some little, some little thing on the golf course to get inside tiger's head and to kind of throw him off his game a little bit, right? But it was methodical. It was planned. It was like Tiger didn't, you know, I don't think, felt like it was always a malicious thing where his dad was just trying to, there was a process to it. And I think that's important as an operator to kind of get assistance to be like, I am going to be hard on you from time to time. I am going to be difficult on time to time. But this is not me like making a personal malicious attack against you. This is trying to me to prepare you for the wider world of

clients, difficult situations, etc. Yeah. So I mean, if I could distill it all down, I would say that to create the ideal assistant and what would be the word for somebody who has the assistant? Senior, uh, mentor, operator, colorist, whatever,

you know, but the assistant and the assistee relationship, both of them have a set of expectations and responsibilities and responsibilities I think need to be taken very seriously. On the person hiring the assistance side, it is you need to come in with an attitude of I am going to teach, I am going to mentor. Yep. And yes, if I get some help with my labor, that's wonderful.

I won't always get the help I want. I need to be able to turn mistakes into learning opportunities. I need to actually plan this, not wing it. The syllabus, I think the idea of a syllabus mentality, I had not heard that before until today, and I think that's the perfect way of describing how you should take this relationship, you know, attitude-wise, right? Then from the assistance standpoint, right,

You need to be, one, ready to learn and be attentive. You're not there to be on your phone goofing off all day. Right. You need to be ready to do some of the menial, tedious work that you don't want to do. And you need to have a good attitude about it. And you also need to be ready to make honest mistakes, take information that you've assumed over the years. You know, we talked a lot about the democratization of the technology and learning this software.

The problem with that is a lot of people learn a lot of the wrong things. just look at any resolve Facebook group. You know, what to us is a kind of assumed skill, color management. And we've talked about doing a whole podcast about this and we will. Why everybody is wrong about everything with color management. Go to any resolve Facebook group and look at any of the screen grabs of somebody saying, why does my image not look right? And they have a complete random spattering of color management settings.

There is so much bad information out there and so many, like little, pieces of good information out there. So an assistant may come to you knowing a lot already, and you need to be able to say, okay, well, you're right about this, we can expand on that, you learned this completely wrong. And both sides of that relationship need to be ready for that situation. The assistant to learn and to understand that what they think they know might be wrong, and the assistee to be ready to turn things into a learning opportunity and be patient when things don't go right. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think, you know, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, I thing that I will say, and I have to be careful about how I tread on this because, um, at my advanced

stage these days, I tend to be a little bit of get off my lawn kind of attitude, right? Um, but I will say, one of the things that ruins the assistant relationship for me, and I'm just going to use a, I don't know if this is the right word for it. But is they like, um, but is they like, you know, just kind of a lazy, like not caring attitude, right? So you mentioned mistakes. I, you know, I see a lot of people like, yeah, I made a mistake, big deal. Like, no, that's not the attitude I want you to have. I want your attitude.

If you got pointed out that you made a mistake. Okay, I'm sorry about the mistake, no problem. Can you know, the responsibility of the assistant is, I'm sorry I made that mistake, but can you teach me how to do better? I want to learn from this. I want to get better at this. And honestly, that might mean for the assistant, putting in some extra hours to learn how to do something, or, you know, asking around the rest of the facility,

or being proactive and going on various groups and forums and going, hey, this happened to me in my job, you know, can somebody give me some, you know, additional advice? Like, it's not a one way, you know, the mentor, operator, feeding everything downhill. That assistant has to take some responsibility for their own learning, too. And then I think the last thing I'll add to this conversation is, and you had said this, but I'm going to say it in a slightly different way, that I think on the operator, the mentor's point of view, if you're in this just to get somebody to do work for you, that's the wrong reason to do. Like, hire another operator to do the work and just, you know, delegate to them, right?

If you're going into this, the real role, and the real goal you should have is if, God forbid, I drop dead, I've trained a person who can fill my spot to come up there with the necessary skills to be good at this. You know, and I talked to a lot of people, you know, from time to time, they're like, well, I don't want to put in all this effort. or if they're just going to go to wherever, go to some big facility in New York or L.A. or London. I want that for them. If I've done my job right, I've advanced their career enough. And that's a great learning opportunity for them.

Absolutely. And they will probably speak very highly of you. Everybody wins. And move them up the ladder. That's a win for me, right? And I like, I don't, as you said at the top of the conversation, this person shouldn't be an assistant forever. And if they are, something wrong about that pipeline is wrong.

You know? We can't think about this industry as a zero-sum game. And we've we've had this in various different things. Okay, if I train an assistant, what if they become better than me and take all my clients? If I can buy Resolve for $300, why is someone going to pay me to do the work? But no, it never pans out that way. All of the doom and gloom of the industry is going to end because Resolve is $300, because AI is coming, because all the assistants are going to learn on YouTube and displace us.

It's never come to fruition and it never will. Yeah. Very cool. So obviously a deep topic, I'm sure we could keep on blabbing about this, but we've talked for a while. If you are trying to be an assistant, whether it be an editorial, audio, color, finishing visual effects, like, go for it. You know, try to get hooked up with facilities. Don't be afraid to reach out. Don't be afraid to tell people what you know and what you, more importantly, what you don't know and what you're trying to get out of it.

I do think that, you know, matching up to the right set of people or a facility is an important part of this equation that we didn't really. explore, but, you know, if you're going after you love doing commercial work, then probably going to a place that's doing a bunch of episodic or long form is probably not the best place for you to go, right? Or vice versa. So trying to match up with a person, if there is a hero that you have, you know, like if I could go, whatever, be Walter or Dave Hussie's, you know, assistant, great. Like, you know, those are two heroes of mine. I would have done that, probably not now, but, you know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Try to try to do that as well. And on the mentor side, or the operator side, yeah, going into this with a plan, going into this with clear communication,

going into this with trying to improve the person that you're taking under your wings, professional life is the way to go. So good stuff. If you have any comments, please let us know. And as always, thanks for checking out this edition of the Offset Podcast. I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for watching.