NYC-Feature Story

Dream Tech Jobs

Living in a technology-saturated world isn’t so bad—at least not if you love making web videos, Photoshopping images, or dreaming up futuristic designs. If so, your favorite technology-driven hobby may one day become your full-time job.

What’s it like to land a dream tech job? To find out, we interviewed a director, producer, and video editor for the comedy website collegehumor.com; a graphic designer who won a live design tournament; and a creative architect with plans to transform our cities and suburbs. Here, read more about what they do and how they wound up getting paid to do it.

—Marco Salazar

Viral Video Originator

Who: Matthew Pollock is a producer, director, and video editor at the comedy website CollegeHumor.com. He works on two of the site’s popular series: Jake and Amir, which follows two goofy (fictional) guys who live and work together, and Hardly Working, a spoof about College Humor’s own staff.

Software most used: Final Cut Pro

Salary range for a video editor: $30,000 starting out as an assistant, up to $300,000 for high-level editors.

Stuff lying around the office: A giant Pikachu costume, an inflatable palm tree, a dummy, and several huge bean bags.

In his words:

I made shorts with my friends in high school—drama, action, comedies. You really can just shoot on weekends and learn filmmaking skills. I went to film school at the School of Visual Arts, then got an internship working on TV commercials and worked my butt off until they hired me full time. Eventually I got this job at CollegeHumor.com.

As a video editor and director, the most important thing is your reel, which is all the videos, commercials, movies, and whatever else you’ve worked on. If you have a good reel, you’re going to do well.

I’m usually working on five or six videos at a time. It’s a lot of juggling. I’ll come in and tweak the projects and make them better based on notes from my colleagues. I also look at new scripts to figure out the best way to shoot them, and maybe shoot a new video.

I get to do what I love for a living, and work with some really talented writers, directors, and cinematographers. There’s a lot of laughing at the office. You watch the footage or read a script and it’s hard not to laugh. Also, I actually get paid to watch comedians at a live show we do once a month.

Internet video is a driving force in our pop culture. The TV audience is moving to the Internet. Hulu, which has tons of TV shows, has millions of views per week. But College Humor is one of the only companies that’s able to make money making viral videos, which are videos that get passed around from person to person through e-mail, Facebook, blogs, and other websites.

“Prank Wars 7” is probably the biggest viral video I’ve worked on. In that video, one of my co-workers, Amir, was actually duped into believing he’d won half a million dollars. When he found out it wasn’t true, Amir was extremely shocked and upset.

To see that prank pulled on a co-worker was hilarious. I was up all night editing the video. It blew up immediately. It went from being shot to being on TV in less than 24 hours, which is crazy. It’s gotten more than 3 million views. That’s a good feeling.

If you have a camera, you can shoot a video. If you have a computer, you can edit it and upload it to the Internet. Anyone can do it, which is great because it pushes the medium: If a young kid does a stop motion video and puts it on YouTube, it might change how people are thinking about videos in the profession. At the same time, it’s scary because if anyone can do it, you have to ask yourself, “Why would someone pay me to do it?”

To be successful at this, you need to be devoted to your craft. You also need to be a person that people want to work with; friendly but without being annoyingly perky. And being a good storyteller is super important, whether you’re an editor, writer, or director.

My advice to teens who want to make videos is: Make them! It’s kind of clichéd and cheesy, but go out and do it. Write a story, grab a camera, and shoot away.

Check out Matthew Pollock’s work at CollegeHumor.com

As told to NYC writer Conor Dawson.

Digital Doodler

Who: Guillermo Echevarria is a Brooklyn-based freelance graphic designer and art director. (“Freelance” means he takes on projects for different clients instead of being employed by one company.) He was the 2006 New York 2-D champion of Cut & Paste, a tournament in which top graphic designers in different cities compete in front of live audiences. (“It’s like a B-boy battle but with Photoshop,” he says.) He’s now a competition director for Cut & Paste.

Software most used: Adobe—Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign. (Also pen and paper, because “Some things you just have to draw. And there’s the combination of drawn elements with computer elements: You put them together, it looks dope.”)

Salary range in the field: $30,000-$100,000, depending on skill, experience, and who you’re working for.

In his words:

People think design is easy, that Photoshop does everything for you, and that’s not true. Photoshop is like a pencil. The pencil’s not going to draw by itself.

I went to art school. You don’t have to, but it helps you push yourself to be better. You’ll come back with your finished product and your teachers will say, “This is no good”—but they’ll tell you why it’s not working. That’s how you learn to make it work better.

The biggest challenge is coming up with something new every day, having something new to bring to every project. You can’t repeat yourself and every client, every project, every product is different.

“I didn’t want to be that guy who’s painting all day and then works at a bar at night. I want to live off my talent.”

There are two ways of looking at it: I work for myself, or for a bunch of different clients, mostly advertising agencies. I wake up and check my e-mail, because that’s how I know what I’m doing that day. That’s how I deal with my clients most of the time.

It sounds ideal to be your own boss, but if you don’t have someone there to push you, it’s easy to say, “Oh, I don’t feel like working today.” And the next day, “I’d rather go to the park and chill with my bro.” You keep putting it off, and it ends in chaos. You need a lot of self-discipline to be a freelancer—with your money, too, because you’re not going to get a check every two weeks. There are times when I haven’t had a check in three months.

A lot of people think that they can just go out and make their own company and be successful immediately; that’s probably not going to happen. You probably need to work in an office with a boss first. It took me seven, eight years to be confident enough to not work for a company.

Everything is design. [Holds up an iPhone.] All these buttons, all these menus, someone had to figure out: “How is this going to look?” Everything you see around you, someone designed it.

If you’re looking through a magazine and you see an ad that you really like, try to stop for a second, look at it, and determine: What is it that you like about it? Is the photography really well shot; is the typography really good; is it the colors? Once you isolate that one thing that makes the ad really good, you can try to use that for your own work.

Nobody in my family is a designer, but my mom never gave me a toy gun, ever. Or a GI Joe. It was always a creative-type toy: Legos, markers, crayons. What’s the point of buying a kid a toy gun? He’s not going to learn anything from it. It’s not even fun.

Very few painters actually survive on painting—and I didn’t want to be that guy who’s painting all day and then works at a bar at night. I want to live off my talent.

Graphic design is one of the most viable ways to live off of your talent, because it’s a commercial field. A lot of people think design is about making pretty and cool things, but most of the time you’re trying to promote or sell something. There’s money involved; there are clients involved.

A lot of kids start on their first job and they’re like, “Oh, look at what I made, isn’t it awesome?” And their boss says, “It’s pretty, but it’s not what is needed for this project.” A lot of young kids get angry and frustrated.

You need to separate yourself from the work you do. If someone says, “I don’t like that poster,” you can’t be offended. The best thing you can do is ask them why they don’t like it, and then try to use that feedback for the future.

Check out Guillermo Echevarria’s designs at his website: elegalindus3.com

As told to NYC writer Marco Salazar.

Architect of the Future

Who: Mitchell Joachim is a co-founder and partner of Terreform 1, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit design group. Terreform 1 promotes environmentally friendly, energy-efficient design for cities and suburbs. That means “Dr. J” comes up with models for jetpacks, futuristic tree houses, blimp buses, and other fascinating features you might find in America, circa 2150.

Wired magazine included him in “The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To” and Rolling Stone named him one of “The 100 People Who Are Changing America.” He also teaches green architecture and design at Columbia University and at Parsons the New School for Design.

Education: Bachelor of Professional Studies, SUNY Buffalo; Master of Architecture, Columbia University; Master of Architecture in Urban Design, Harvard University; Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In his words:

If I was to invent a new type of telecommunication device, I would expect it to catch on within five to seven years, like the cell phone replacing the landline. But it takes about 150 years to transform cities. Every American city in the 20th century was designed around the automobile. We now need to design mobility systems to fit cities. We’ve got to stop the tyranny of the car. One big thing is to combine housing and mobility.

We want to put renewable infrastructure, a smart grid, along America’s existing highways. The highways would be fitted with wind, geothermal, or solar power stations to power mopeds, trailers, or homes on wheels. And you would live in a loop, traveling between cities. America would be a country on wheels; we mean that literally. The model is called Homeway.

Obviously, it’s about being provocative. It’s supposed to change people’s opinions about how wasteful they are, to get them to understand that it’s actually less energy intensive to put a house on wheels than to build a house in the suburbs where you have to add more infrastructure.

“We’re starting to think of a jetpack city”

People always accuse me of liking elves, because I have these tree house designs. And I do like elves. In school I liked Dungeons and Dragons; they put the honor students in special rooms so we could learn this game that was supposed to make us smarter. And everyone I know who played ended up at Harvard or Yale. Dungeons and Dragons inventor Gary Gygax was a big influence of mine. And [Spanish architect] Antoni Gaudi.

I get new ideas a lot, and mostly it’s things that someone tells me are wrong. In 2008, the cover of the New York Times reported the Martin Aircraft Company had perfected the safety mechanism for using jetpacks. If we were talking about elevators 160 years ago, how we’re all going to use elevators, you would’ve said, “No way.” It wasn’t until Elisha Otis came along and developed the safety brake that elevators became common.

It’s the same thing with jetpacks. The invention’s been around since before the 1950s; it’s the safety mechanism that makes it real. So we’re starting to think of a jetpack city. We designed some. They’re soft jetpacks—they move in blocks; you can rub up against a jetpack buddy.

I love soft. I don’t want anyone to die moving around. Our vehicles don’t even move fast. Compared to the cities of today, our cities are softer, gentler, and they move.

Check out Mitchell Joachim’s designs at terreform.org

As told to New Youth Connections.

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