Tale #31 - The Tale of Tutors

Hi, all!

Well... anyways, yes. I have been working on some art, but it relates to something much bigger (as far as this goes, I'll be posting it way later because I'm still playing around with it.) What is it? Well... a freelance media-tutoring service. You see, I noticed around my city that those who are extremely skilled with the media arts don't tend to stick around leaving it media-deprived (If you seen the webpages to our local buisnesses, you'd swear they were created in 1997 when they were really created in 2007. It's actually kinda scary!) But to those who do stay who do have the skills, can't seem to find jobs. It's really kinda weird. You'd think they'd be the first ones to be snapped up in an instant. But the local industry is quite a stubborn one and really dislikes newness or change or really anything different. Introduce "SWFs" instead of "GIFs" for animated graphics to them and you'd scare the willies right out of them. This is where I have the problems getting hired. I mean as you've already seen, I do have skills and I'm always building off of them. But the local industry is really turned off by me eventhough the minimum requirement for experiance here is as low as 1-2 years. Sometimes even less than a year. But yet, here I am with 1.5 years of experiance, 8.5 years of photoshop and 3 years of education in the media arts and I'm struggling badly. But my background is a bit bigger than that. I've also got mechanical skills too from the time I was working with and maintaining aircraft and stuff like that. The local industry really gets scared off whenever I bring that up. And it's impossible not to because it was actual work experiance I've had in the past. It's the weirdest thing but yet, it shows off a little backwards logic on my local industry's part. So I'm stuck freelancing and trying to scrape together every bit of experiance I can. And it's not like I can freely move out of my city either unless I was hired out by a buisness. So in the meantime, what other options do I have? I can either stay freelance and bounce from client to client (Which isn't the worst thing out there either. At least I can get experiance from this. All my clients so far came from the education field.) or do freelance but also apply my skills in more different ways. You know.... kinda broaden the field? Then it hit me. What the other skilled freelancers are doing in my city are also teachers. So that got me thinking - what if I started teaching too? I mean I have volunteer-taught drama in the past and have the skills to do it, so why can't I teach anything now? So the idea of becoming a media arts tutor came to me. There are enough people who would be a bit open minded who don't know the stuff I do and would like to learn it. So I'd tutor them in the media arts so they have a little bit of info and skills to help them out in media.

Cool idea, eh? Well! I also managed to book one of the local Mac labs/computer cafes and scouted out good freeware (similar to real software packages used in the industry only freeware forms/clones of it.) to use for tutoring. My advertising slant? "Awesome Movies Secrets Revealed (That You Can Do Too)." I figured that was a good way to go since everyone likes secrets and like them even more if they can learn how to do them. It has somewhat of a faux-forbidden quality to it eventhough it isn't. So that's my advertising strategy. Hopefully this idea works. If not... uh.... does anyone want a freelancer with 1.5 years of experiance? Will work for bandwidth! XD

Anyways, I'm thinking of posting some tutorials some time as well. I was thinking of putting up some blogger tips. But you know, not the ones you always get that everyone rehashes over and over again saying "make your blog about politics and annoy the tar out of everyone" or the "make your blogs about money tips and look like spam kings/queens." No! I mean actual real blogging tips that you can use so you don't have to go all spammy or all politicaly. These tips will be out there to help other media arts freelancers like me to at least help them out a little bit. I think it would be a nice way for me to give back a little bit and help each other out. Don't you agree?

Anyways, I've gotta get going! See you all later!