Gave my two week notice yesterday. My boss already knew it was coming, and he was really cool about it. It was a weird sensation walking from his office, back out into the newsroom. It was completely official: I'm leaving very soon. I'm already feeling slightly disconnected already - especially when everyone talks about sweeps, and upcoming projects.

But, I quickly shake all of that off and get down to business. If I'm going to get another job soon: I'm going to need a resume tape.

I've been at kptv for just over six years, and I haven't had to make a it's-for-real-I'm-looking-for-a-new-job tape in quite a while. Where to begin? I've probably shot like five million stories in the last few years, and I needed to narrow it down to only a few little gems.



I scoured the station for looking for various tapes, and got a pretty decent tape all planned out. Looking over the list I thought to myself, "It's looking pretty good, but I wonder if anyone will care that there isn't a lot of general news stuff, and mainly a bunch of feature stories?" An hour later I got a call from my former boss. He said to me, "I know that you've most-likely started on your resume tape, and it's probably great. But, you need to make sure you put more general news stuff on there, and not just load it with cool looking feature stories." I said to him, "Oh yeah, no problem" as I reluctantly went back to the archive room, searching for more G-news stuff.

Putting "general news" stories on your tape shows them that you can do the grunt work, and not make it look sloppy. But, at the same time they probably want it to have 'something special.' This becomes a problem for me because nearly 90% of the news that I cover involves "meth babies" and "sex offenders on the run" - neither of which have stellar, natural sound or magic moments. And, since our show is at night, we are required to start every story with "night video" to give it a more fresh appeal - even if the thing we covered happened at high noon. So, even if I had something really awesome that didn't involve a meth baby, there'll be ten seconds of semi-dark video at the beginning as the reporter backs into the story.

Anyway, I found two sorta-decent G-news stories and weaved them into the tape.

To me, making a good resume tape is like making a romantic mix tape for girl back in tenth grade. Each and every new song (or in this case, news package) has to look somewhat random, but is completely deliberate and crafted from an intense obsessive mind set. You don't want to look too lame or needy right away, but you don't want to start with too much flash and come across like an overconfident jerk. So, I slave over the detail and composition of every story, and pretend that I'm watching as if I'm someone else watching the tape and thinking about the person who made it (me).

Here's my line-up (awesome stores are in italics):

"Stolen Tip Jar" - general news
"Holiday Toy Drive" - general news
"Digital Exterminators" - photo essay
"Mail for Grabs" - investigative
"FBI Academy" - sweeps feature
"Tongue Splitting" - feature
"PDX Fashion" - photo essay
"Dirty Bathroom Keys" - investigative
"Majestic" - sweeps feature
"X in PDX" - sweeps feature

Okay, it's a little long, but I figure they can stop the tape when they've seen enough, or are compelled to call me that very moment. Better to be over-prepared anyway, I think.


After all the hard stuff is done, the RESUME TAPE DUB STATION 3000 does the rest!



It can make a ton of dubs at one time, while handling each one with tender loving care. One some occasions the dub station is being used to make copies of weird manga-cartoons or crappy infomercials, but tonight it was all mine.



And, with great alacrity and nimble fingers (something photogs are known for) I was able to fire off a ton of tapes (and DVDs) in no time.

Tomorrow I throw them in the mail, and the waiting game begins...