Fast Fiction

It comes up from time to time, what I do for a living. Well, how I make my wages, it’s not really a living because I don’t consider my job a career. It’s just something I do to make money. And I love it for many reasons. It’s not difficult, there’s very little bull involved. The hours are very regular and I have a swell office all to myself with a kick-ass computer set up and all the software my little heart desires.

I’m not sure of my title. Sometimes I’m called Digital Asset Adminstrator and sometimes Webmaster. But I do other stuff that has little to do with file management, like writing biographies and synopses. I create some graphics, but it’s not really in my job description, I just do it sometimes because it’s easier than hiring someone.

I work for an entertainment company, and we distribute TV shows and features and telefilms. I control all of the content for a couple of websites. (Maybe I’m a Content Adminstrator.) Anyway, the first website I run is a business-to-business fullfillment website. Our clients, all over the world buy our products. And then they want to promote them. So I get the high resolution photos from the shows and movies and I name them (in a convention that was set up by a committee so that all files have unique names and somehow relate to whatever they are and aren’t longer than 16 characters - we’ve got about 15,000 so far, so you can see that it is a little struggle sometimes). And I upload them to the website and I associate information with those files (called metadata) so that folks can figure out what they are and what they want. Then, like a store or something, they put them in little shopping carts and download them in huge batches. Some of our files are just documents - biographies, synopses, fact sheets, etc., so they’re not huge. But others are 600 dpi 8x10 photos, so you can imagine that we have a great webhost and stuff like that for this kind of throughput.

The other website I work on is for buyers of our materials and it highlights just what we have in our most recent catalogue. And around this time of year we promote stuff we’re thinking about offering, our pilots. I try not to get too involved in this, because the majority of them never come to fruition, and so I never have to do anything with them. But while they’re still in the planning stages we use the site to disseminate info to our teams around the globe.

The fun part of the job is our archive. We went digital about three years ago and the only time we send out physical slides and printed materials is when we have old inventory. If we’ve run out, then that title goes into the queue for digitizing. Some of the titles are huge shows that were on the air for a dozen years and have hundreds of episodes. Some are movies-of-the-week and others are feature films. Some are completely forgettable and others are little gems that make you want them to put the show back on TV. So, I sit here with my cool slide scanner and plug away at the piles of slides in my inbox. Each one gets a bit of retouching and color correction and then gets uploaded to our site.

I like to think that I’m doing my part to save the planet. By reducing physical press kits we’re eliminating the reproduction costs associated with them (photography makes some nasty waste products) and the shipping. Then I look at the increase in quality ... our clients get stuff on demand and in a format that’s better than the duplicates they would get and already in a form they can use. It’s pretty cool and I’m rather proud of it.

In the rest of my life, there is no such thing as perfection. But databases can be perfect and I take great joy in that; I can do something everyday that can be held up and praised as well done. Face it, we all like a pat on the back every once in a while.