AN INTRODUCTION

My name is John Papola and this blog is going to be a place where I dump the strange brew of thoughts I have regarding the world of Media and Technology. As the URL suggests, the technology side of this blog is going to skew toward the Mac platform as it is my tool of choice... and I think they're pretty great in general.

Here's a little background on me for some context.

I started off, after graduating film school from Penn State University, as a production assistant in a fledgling (and now extinct) division of MTV's Animation Studio call "MTV Commericials". This was a group formed as a commercial production company within MTV Networks that could provide the "MTV Look" to national agency campaigns. It was a pretty cool idea run by Nick Litwinko, a great guy, and it was here that I cut my teeth on how commercials get made.

Being inside MTV Networks can be great if you're prepared to move around among it's many networks and divisions. It's made pretty easy, generally encouraged and I did it quite a few times. As an aspiring director, I realized pretty quickly that big agencies were never going to take a chance on some kid fresh out of school with no real (and for good reason), so I took an opportunity to move into the Animation Development department.

It was there that I learned After Effects animation in a serious way working on show pilots with some of the real pioneers in TV animation using AE (Blues Clues and Little Bill basically invented the workflow for using AE as a character animation tool), as well as doing script coverage and taking pitches. In typical MTV fashion, I was a production assistant getting paid a dept-inducing wage, but was interested in doing more and was given more to do. I worked with some really amazing people there, including the multi-talented Writer/Director and close friend Adam Egypt Mortimer as well as a not-yet-superstar-but-clearly-supertalented Mike Dougherty, who's now a major hollywood screenwriter (X-Men, Superman Returns).

Alas, with the dotcom bust and waning of animation at MTV I was laid off along with the rest of MTV Animation in 2001. After a brief-but-stressful stint on unemployment (recensions aren't so fun), I landed a job as a designer/animator at Nickelodeon working once again in a commercials-like division. This is where I really got the opportunities that I consider crucial to any success I now enjoy. The group, headed by Frank Czuchan (a truly amazing boss and human being), was focused on spots for Nickelodeon's marketing and consumer products division. Over the course of my three years there, I worked my way from simply designing and animating motion graphics to editing and eventually producing and directing. This post-production-centered approach remains the core of how I work and is, in my humble opinion, one of the best ways to get into the business.

In early 2003 I moved from Nickelodeon to Nicktoons, their startup digital cable channel, to help launch it with a series of special-fx heavy spots that are still some of the best work I've done. But the stay at Nicktoons was cut short when an opportunity opened for me to move to Spike TV, the then newly re-branded cable net (formerly TNN) under the leadership of my long-time mentor Niels Schuurmans (one of the most prolific creative mind I know). I told you I moved around a bunch.

And so for the past three years I've been at Spike, where I'm now an Executive Producer and Director in the on-air promotions department. Being at a growing TV network right now provides some interesting perspective on the wildly changing landscape of the media and media-centric technology. I hope this perspective will make this blog a useful read for those of you interested in this stuff. As a major geek and someone not high enough up the corporate ladder to be scared of change, I'm quite excited about the changes happening in media creation, distribution and consumption. I must say that most of the people at Spike are forward thinking about the media world and ready to try new things (though obviously being a Viacom company limits some of these abilties for various reasons). Despite what much of the new-media blogosphere likes say, the "old-media" houses are teaming with people that "get it". Turning these big ships just isn't all that easy. Something about not wanting to actively cannibalize their revenue sources or something...

Anyway, I've learned a lot about how TV works as a business while at Spike and I'm learning more every day about how it's changing in this new landscape of unlimited choice.

While Spike is a tradition cable network within one of the biggest "old-media" conglomerates, we're definitely a new-school shop on the post-production side of things, relying entirely and exclusively on Final Cut Pro for in-house editing and desktop Macintosh tools for graphics and animation. I hope to post about my work-flows and how we get stuff made with the latest tools as much as possible.

Well... that's it for now. As you can see (if you made it this far) I'm, shall we say... verbose. I'm more likely to take time and dig in on a subject than simply post pithy commentary and links. I hope you find the blog useful and perhaps on occasion even entertaining.

jp