Sour, like lemons. That's how this feels.
NAB is canceled. So is international air travel for the next 2-4 weeks. Plus, pro and college sports. And this is just the start of the list.
Is all of this an overreaction? I'm withholding my judgement for at least a year. We just won't know until a full cycle of Earth's orbit passes us through our three seasons (in Central and Southern Florida, we skip winter).
If this tastes like lemons, we might as well see if we can make lemonade.
What are some bright points we can look for right now? I'm going to take a moment to first remind you how the Tao Newsletter (and its supporters) can help you in this regard. Then, I'll offer up more altruistic actions we can all take in this moment of disruption and unease.
Assuming we are not all out of work for an extended period of time, this 'disruption' means that travel budgets will free up money for other uses - such as physical gear upgrades.
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Travel dollars can also be shifted to hiring external services that may have been considered a luxury - but solve a big pain point. Again, in this context, Tao Newsletter sponsor
EndCrawl does just that - creating top notch end credits that can be altered on a whim and timed precisely to your clock, without the typical visual
artifacts of title crawls (wasting the valuable time of your artists cleaning up those artifacts and shifting the burden onto less expensive but talented assistants).
Near and dear to my heart is
Mixing Light (in which I'm a co-founder), serving the educational needs of creative professionals. This may be the time to deepen the educational budget
using a corporate or educational account giving teams of creatives a deeper understanding of color grading workflows and techniques (at a deep discount to individual memberships). All of it online and available according to the needs of your creatives.
Broadening the view beyond this Newsletter, we can also look to giving back to the community around us.
The
Folding@home team have closed down the search for extraterrestrial life (they are now analyzing a decade's worth of data) and shifting their platform to fighting disease. You can install their software, and use your dormant CPU cycles
to help run simulations on how COVID-19 interacts and binds to proteins on our cells.
Closer to home, if you've ever used
Rampant Design's templates, VFX overlays, or music then
you'll be sad to hear that Rampant's Sean Mullen has been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Sean and his wife have been forced to self-fund his treatments, to the tune of $150,000.
They have set up a Go Fund Me page and are 1/3 the way there. Join me in helping this micro business husband/wife creative team overcome their very own critical emergency.
Would you like to help Sean Mullen but need to do it within a corporate budget?
Flanders Scientific is offering 50% of the gross sales of their famous cleaning kits to Sean and Stefanie's Go Fund Me account. With NAB being canceled, FSI found themselves with a truckload of these kits.
Click here for their Tweet with the link to buy a handful of kits while helping our peers in need.
Lemons and lemonade.
That's how my mind is rolling this week. But I'm keeping the rest of this week's content squarely on our craft! Keep in mind, NAB / COVID-19 events seemed to have slowed down hard news related to color grading software & hardware. But I found some interesting things to share.
I'll see you next Sunday. Stay healthy.
Happy Grading!
(and remember - if you have a story that's a fit for this Newsletter, hit reply or email it to 'newsletter@taoofcolor.com'! Include a quick reason for the suggested link.)
- Patrick Inhofer
Colorist | Publisher | Coach
