Splice Now

15% of kids 6 to 11 are now obese. Yes, you read that right. And a new study says that 60% of overweight incidents in children can be traced to too much time in front of the tube. If that’s true for kids, what about for us? Don’t we log more screen time than an average school kid?

When I taught editing a few years ago I sometimes saw the bodies of students change. Their minds and skill sets expanded — but their bodies did, too. And it isn’t just happening to students. Too often, the job just isn’t good for you.

What are the causes? Too many hours indoors is one problem. Not only does lack of sunlight make you tired and sick-looking, but it influences your mood as well. If you don’t see a half hour of daylight every day you can get what’s called “SAD,” or seasonal affective disorder, which manifests mainly as depression. The cure is sunlight, or artificial light that matches its spectral characteristics.

Posture and repetitive motion disorders are omnipresent, too. I’ll wager that every one of us knows somebody who’s had carpal tunnel symdrome, or something like it.

Not enough sleep is another hazard. So is stress. Here in the US we all make jokes about the French, but a 35 hour work week and 6 weeks of vacation a year go a long way toward making life livable.

And that waistline? A lot of it has to do with the lunches we eat. Take out — the fat and carb express. When you’re under stress you’re genetically programmed to want that stuff and it’s always hard to go for the salad when somebody else is having a cheeseburger and fries.

And, of course, we don’t get enough exercise. You’re supposed to do something physical every day — just a 20 or 30 minute brisk walk does wonders. But when we’re working the hours we do, that isn’t so easy.

Last summer I was able to do something unusual for me — I commuted to work on a bicycle. And the effects of doing that for three months were clearly visible on my body and in my mind. I got to work feeling refreshed, and I looked forward to the trip home every night.

It’s too bad that we can’t find a way to do that kind of thing more regularly. I love the work I do, but I love it even more when it’s part of a balanced life.

Does anybody remember working nine to five? The last time I did that on a regular basis was in the late ’70s. I recall that it was a near-blissful experience: a regular work schedule and a genuine life after work every day. That’s never been the rule in post-production but it was once the rule for most of corporate America and, guess what, it profoundly changes your life — and your family’s life.

In France, the standard work week is now 35 hours. Americans can’t believe that. It’s so foreign to us that we just can’t process it.

I remember a meeting of union activists I attended many years ago. We went around the room and talked about things we’d wish for. I said that my main wish was to go home while the sun was still shining. That got a big laugh from everybody. Ha ha! Never happen!

Does what we do really require 14- or 16-hour days? Or is it simply a habit we’ve collectively adopted? The culture is so frenetic and competitive that we can no longer go home at a reasonable hour without feeling that we’re somehow cheating. The only way you can get your life back, it seems, is by working at home — and then you can’t go home at all.

Generations of editors have lived with this work ethic and some have died at their Moviolas, valiantly pushing on. The non-linear revolution hasn’t changed this at all. We bemoan the crisis of values in our culture, the lack of family connections, the alienation. And we keep on working.

Haskel Wexler’s film “Who Needs Sleep” covers this subject in compelling detail. You can buy the DVD here. He’s also started a group called “12 On / 12 Off,” which focuses on creating reasonable work schedules in the film business.

Technorati Tags: media and society

I’m starting to think that the fastest way we Americans could help reduce global warming is by just turning stuff off when it’s not in use. I’m a bicyclist and I can’t begin to count the number of people I ride by who are sitting in parked cars, talking on their cell phones — with their engines running. Folks, you are getting zero miles per gallon!

We could do a lot just by turning lights off when they’re not in use. How many rooms in your home are lit up at night with nobody using them? In post-production, we leave the juice on way more than we need to. Do you leave all the lights on in your cutting rooms when you go to lunch? Or when you go home at night? Lots of people leave their whole editing setup on 24/7.

Last year Canon estimated that about 44 million kilowatt-hours of electricity would be wasted in Great Britain by leaving office equipment on standby over the ten-day Christmas holiday. The price for all those machines doing nothing was estimated to be about $17 million, or about 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere.

Yes, I’ve heard that hard drives last longer if they’re never turned off. Maybe so. But drives are a lot more reliable now than they used to be. It’s hard to believe that turning a drive off a few hundred times a year makes much of a difference, when Seagate says their drives can easily go to 100,000 stop/start cycles. Could take a while to use that up.

Maybe it’s time for us editors to start turning things off at night. We could save a lot of watt-hours, and these days we need to do as much of that as we can.

Will it come to a surprise to anyone that under the Bush administration the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the organization that is supposed to protect people from workplace injuries, has mainly eliminated regulations and made life easier for business? Stephen Labaton lays this out in a revealing New York Times article today (also available here). The piece quotes Dr. David Michaels, an occupational health expert at George Washington University: “The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency. If they ever knew how to issue regulations, they’ve forgotten. The concern about protecting workers has gone out the window.”

And, big surprise, the article goes on to say, “Three of the biggest industries regulated by OSHA — transportation, agribusiness and construction — have given more than $630 million in political campaign contributions since 2000, with nearly three-quarters of that money going to Republicans.”

I bring this up here because repetitive motion disorders — carpal tunnel and the like — have gotten little attention from the agency. Nor has monitor radiation, or other issues that impact so many of us who are staring at screens for 10 or 12 hours a day. Quoting the article again, “In one of his first acts in office, Bush signed legislation repealing one of OSHA’s most-debated accomplishments during the Clinton administration, an ergonomics standard intended to reduce injuries to factory, construction and office workers from repetitive motions and lifting.”

OSHA is headed by Edwin Foulke, who used to work for a law firm that advised companies on how to avoid unionization.

House and Senate committees are holding OSHA oversight hearings this week.