Technical Producer

Jeff and his wife Kristi
with their children Jessica and Russell, seen here enjoying life again after having been buried in an Avalanche for four months.

The gem in Avalanche has surely been Summit Man who sums up the the deeper meaning behind the production of this site... he quotes Mark Twain

Do not try to teach a pig to sing.
It wastes your time and it annoyes the pig...

What is it about the web that make everyone grasp at straws trying to get a handle on what will work here? Seems pretty obvious that the bandwidth won't allow it to be TV. But then there's this pile of money we're dying to throw at you...

Imagine this, a major player in the Online world is funding you to build an episodic web site. The content will be produced in a television style model. It will update DAILY and WEEKLY and you have six weeks to pull it together. They'll front the cost of the first eight weeks of production and after that it will have to become self sustaining through the sale of ADVERTISING

Next thing you know you're sitting in a room with thirteen people all looking at YOU. You were thinking, when you walked in the door, that it's a done deal. As they work the content over they tell you in no uncertain terms that they already put too much money up front on this deal and that what it needs is LESS TEXT and MORE TITS and ASS.

And by the way our focus groups show that if you aren't appealing to a eight grade, post-pubescent, demographic with a three second click factor your project is GONNA DIE.

Ok, I can deal with this...

Cut away from that scene to a sparsely furnished office in Denver. Your new equity partner says: "What you need to do is pare down the graphic content....We try to get the front page in at under 70k...."

Meanwhile, back in Santa Barbara, the graphics guys are cranking out artwork for the site that looks great on T-Shirts...

What's wrong with this picture?

The shooting location and setting for the story will be a remote mountain village in the Colorado Rockies in the dead of WINTER.

The lead writer will live in LA and might just be "computer challenged." He still thinks that a mouse is something that calls for D-Con. Screw it, he's just going to send you the scripts via FAX.

The photographer wants all his images BIGGER and is not afraid to rant about it. He lives on location but will FED-X his film back to Santa Barbara for processing and have the lab return it via FED-X to Colorado. Once it gets back it will be scanned in and FTP'd back to Santa Barbara to the graphics guys who have never produced content for the web, in fact, I'm not sure they know what a "GIF" is when we start the project.

The html guy rolls into work around ten in the morning, dosen't like to answer the phone and takes a day off the day before the site must launch only to find out when he returns that every link in his site is CODED WRONG for the server it must live on.

The deal to provide the quickly turns out to be 486 beater running NT on the local LAN in Boca Raton (the production guys in Denver laugh when I tell them that we've been put on a server in Boca). For two weeks it's "...gee, we guess it keeps dropping the ftp connection because there's a bad link somewhere in the midwest, or maybe, probably it's because you guys are FTP'ing from a Macintosh, (only idiot's use MACs), or maybe it's because you're based in California, or well we don't know... why don't you email SPARKY. Better yet we've decided it would be much better for all concerned if you just MOVED YOUR SITE over to a different server..." This is a good thing...right...

I just can't remember when I enjoyed my work this much....

Jeff heads up DFI Interactive, a Multimedia Production Company based in Santa Barbara, California. His client list includes Apple Computer, Sybase, Charles Schwabb, JetFax, Crandell Group,Hendry Telephone Products and a long list of companies large and small for whom he has produced both online and CD-ROM content. You can email him at dfi@west.net

The opinions expressed above are purely the rantings and ravings of the author and should in no way be construed to reflect the opinions of anyone else involoved in this project, particularly Stephen Pedroff who actually dosen't agree with much of it but was liberal enough to allow Jeff to have his time on the soapbox right here. What a guy...