Matt Baume Mattymatt's blog

Sleep Work

I had another Pixar interview dream last night -- a job had posted at Pixar, and I was asked to come in and meet people and advertise myself for the job. As is usually the case, it wasn't a weird sort of dream -- no flying or talking animals or underwear -- it was all just very normal, slightly scary, very exciting to be on the cusp of working for the greatest company in the world. As I would expect it would be in real life.

The last time I had one of these, the job was to keep track of their library of children's books. Last night, the job was basically what I'm doing at SFist now: browsing blogs, understanding situations, telling interesting stories about real life. I got to meet Brad Bird.

It got weird at the end; suddenly the dream wasn't about me or about Pixar, but about some other guy applying for some other job. He had irrational religious objections to the terms of employment and left the interview in a huff before they could even offer it to him, thereby relieving all the anxiety he had felt about whether or not he would get his dream job.

Evidently not a Mary Poppins Fan

Today, the claim was made by a coworker that British children do not have accents; that they only develop upon reaching adolescence, Queenish vowels sprouting like timid mustaches and breasts.

The Process By Which Things Get Done

From childhood, I was raised to always prepare an agenda prior to a departmental meeting. But the other folks here have different backgrounds, and so our meetings always eventually go the same way:

1. We start by talking about something.
2. The boss loses interest in or respect for whoever's speaking, and turns to a computer to look something up.
3. By the time that it's his turn to talk, he's become engrossed in the Internet, and just sits there softly mumbling aloud whatever it is that he's reading. The rest of us can only silently sit there, watching him clicking around.
4. If someone prompts the meeting to resume, he may or may not respond. If he responds, it will be to answer a question that nobody had actually posed.
5. Eventually, he'll lose interest in the Internet, and he'll lean back and start offering predictions about the future.
6. I am not making this up.
7. We'll disperse, because there's really nothing more to say.
8. After a while, he'll emerge from his office and say, "how're we coming on that thing?" Those will be his exact words.

Multiple Outrages at Work Today

Why oh why oh why do some people feel compelled to make decisions about things that they know nothing about? Why do they insist on pretending that they have all the data they need, when in reality they have none?

• We have decided to videotape the voice talent who are recording dialogue for a 30-second animation test. For this, I have been asked to price out a variety of high-def videocameras, which live in the neighborhood of several thousand dollars.
• While browsing the models that I picked out, someone mused, "Sony has so many model numbers, man ... it's like they're out of control."
• They went on, "hm ... some models are CCD, or 3-CCD ... how do you just get to HD?" This is like asking, "some URLs are FTP some are HTTP ... how do you just get to the Internet?"
• When I explained that prosumer cameras have a better picture quality than consumer, they asked, "why? Is it because of the distance from your hand to the lens?"

Discovered!

On his way into the office today, the head of development heard Billy West on the radio doing some voices, and thought, "hey, that guy sounds pretty good; maybe we can hire him to voice some characters."

Billy's one of the most important voice actors in the industry. He is Sponge-Bob, and Fry from Futurama; he's Bi-Polar Bear; he's Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny, and Porky; he's both Stimpy and Doug; he's a billion other voices, and has even worked with our company before. And yet this is how the head of animated film development discovered him today: doing impressions on Howard Stern.

It Starts With A Malaprop

• At the beginning of a meeting, he said, "I don't want to quote any figures that are fellacious."
• In discussing a business arrangement that has never been attempted before, my heart sank when he said, "I just can't think of a downside."
• We are preparing for a board meeting next week. My department's presentation will be led by the man who believes that stories shouldn't have themes, and judging by the meandering, convoluted, circular spaghetti-pile that I've been told to assemble, that philosophy extends to Power Point presentations.

The Kind of Guy

Today I was asked, "can you think of any modern-day contemporary guitar-playing troubadours?"

Somewhat at a loss, I called up a video of Conor Oberst on YouTube. He was met with approval for his modernity: "ah, the kind of guy who's got fans who wear their hats backwards."

Notes from the underbelly

We had a meeting on Friday. The purpose of the meeting was for my department to inform another department that we wouldn't be using them very much, since we'd found a company in Europe that's cheaper.

Now, my entire company has been waiting, for several years, for my department to finally have some work for everyone. One reason everyone has been hanging on all this time, though some less-than-stimulating projects, has been because they really wanted to work on my department's stuff, once it was ready. And now, hey, it's ready! But someone in Europe is going to get it instead of the people who've been waiting all this time.

The other department took this work as well as can be expected: quietly, politely.

I think this might've been the meeting where, for them, the pieces began to fall into place: oh, perhaps this opportunity that's been hinted at -- that's still being hinted at -- might actually be a bouquet of shit. The chair that looked so nice from far away is, upon closer inspection, an elaborate bear trap.

One reason that it's so difficult for people in my company to notice that we're doomed is that some of the folks in charge are very good at spinning confusing webs of words. They talk so dizzyingly, it's hard to see that they're speaking in gibberish. For example, here's a note that I took at the Friday meeting. This isn't a summary; it's verbatim.

They've been so great. This project was third on their list of interests; they see this as little animals. They've been great so far. We've got these budgets and they've got this giant pipe so they don't have so many people multitasking and they can go like that; once you're up, cruising, and there's downtime, there's a whole pipe of 50 TDs or whatever. It's more people than are working here and for half the price. It's close to our price, but they're going to contribute 50%, so it's close to what you budgeted, then they took half of it out to get us to play with them.

DOOMED.

Whaddya Think?

Feedback, please. (I'm still working on the resumé.)

(Updated slightly, Sunday morning)
 
I'm excited to be writing to you regarding the Production Assistant (job #ILM00790) position at ILM. My years of art production experience -- streamlining artists' work by creating smart systems to manage resources, presentations, and archives -- uniquely qualifies me for this position.

At Wildbrain, I organize thousands of assets for board artists, editors, and producers; my recent presentation of concept art to Wildbrain's Board of Directors was so well received that the CEO asked me to repeat the format for all future meetings. In addition, I converted thousands of previously unlabeled storyboards into an efficiently sorted library, used by artists, editors, and overseas partners. I also wrote instruction manuals for naming storyboards and creating presentations; with my systems in place, we now take frequent advantage of our ability to generate animatics, professionally bound pitch books, and slideshows at a moment's notice.

My inventory-management improvements include saving $10,000 annually at PRN through strategic tape recycling. At Wildbrain, I was asked to stock a discontinued charcoal, and found the one store in the world -- in Tasmania -- that still sold it. By shifting inventory orders from paper to electronic, I eliminated the supply shortages that had previously kept the company from creating large art presentations.

I have built media archives from scratch at several companies, allowing departments to easily share their assets. At Wildbrain, I designed a user-friendly archive, using automated file management to share storyboards, reference, and concept art throughout the company via network or website. My media trafficking improvements at The Jim Henson Company facilitated distribution of overseas footage, resulting in a faster pipeline; and my online footage-request system at PRN doubled efficiency.

I'm confident that my experience will be of great help to ILM, and I'd like an opportunity to meet with you to discuss the abilities that I bring to this position. I can be reached at mattymatt@gmail.com or 415-244-9943. Thank you very much for your consideration; I look forward to your reply.

I'm confident that my experience can be of great help to ILM, and I'd really appreciate an opportunity to meet with you to discuss the abilities that I bring to this position. I can be reached at ---------@gmail.com or 415---------. Thank you very much for your consideration; I look forward to your reply.

Dear Sir

The word you a attempting to evoke is "extemporaneous." Not "contemporaneous."
You are hoping to get extemporaneous performances. That is the word you mean.
Your colleagues, including the clients listening on speakerphone, are all either too polite to correct you, or know that it doesn't matter because the performances will be poor no matter what.
Sincerely etc,
Your employee