Fire-Wired Blog

This is me, day one on the job at Iowa Public Television. That was November 7, 2014. How has five years gone so fast? I am a big time believer in "time flies when you're having fun." While one of the major downsides to believing happiness is the most important element in your life, there's no legitimate reason to complain about being happy? Over the course of five years I've filmed the four corners of the state, directed a bunch of television shows, learned some fun camera tricks, met the President, met countless people who could be president, dressed up as a robotic monkey and danced around on live television, gone on all kinds of outdoor adventures for work, traveled to California for a documentary, met dozens of Iowa filmmakers and talked shop with them, and plenty of other things I'm omitting to keep this list from getting out of control. I REALLY love my job and I love the work I'm allowed to produce. Not every day is cupcakes and confetti, but ...

When I got my first, personal GoPro one of the first videos I shot with it was a drive through Northern California's Avenue of the Giants. Now I've been cutting together personal travel videos for a long time now, but when I sat down to edit the Giants drive down... I just couldn't do it. Driving through the redwoods was just too cool to condense. So on our 20mbps home internet connection I decided to upload all 38 minutes of the 1080i drive. As the upload slowly progressed Marieta asked "Who's gonna watch 35 minutes of us driving?" Well as of this post the answer is more than 10,000 people. Click to watch the video YouTube. While Marieta is still baffled about the success of this video, I get it. If you want to experience a place you're hoping to visit or relive a personal favorite; a polished cut-down video doesn't do it. Videos like this uncut drive offer unfiltered access. So following this experience I've looked for similar opportu...

I have a distinct memory from my junior year at Iowa State where my adviser asked "What are your workplace goals?" It wasn't a question I had ever been asked and certainly not something 21-year-old Pat had every considered. Everyone's been asked about their dream job or their career goals, but I had never heard the specific phrase of "workplace goals." Being someone who likes to reflect on interesting and unexpected encounters it took me a bit to come up with my dream workplace criteria. See workplace doesn't mean employer. I could fire off a list of dream employers in a heartbeat, but that wasn't the question. Second, goal isn't the same thing as dream. Goals are things you work towards and achieve, dreams are things that magically happen, e.g. lucky happenstance. There's also the possibility of dreams turning into nightmares, whereas goals are personally crafted and continually rewarding. After a minute of thinking out-loud about wha...

Content wheel at ResponsiblyWild.com Maintaining an online footprint can be exhausting. Pretty much anyone who keeps tabs on their professional versus personal image knows exactly what that entails. As fun as it is to make snarky remarks on Twitter, are you comfortable with a prospective employer reading them? It can get especially frustrating when pretty much everything you've ever produced or will produce exists somewhere on the information super highway. That is scarily close to my situation. Virtually every news report, wedding video, podcast, graphic, fundraising video, tech column, music video, and everything else I've produced can be found online. Sure I upload a great deal of it myself, but I suspect for every four things I personally put online, a fifth item is uploaded with my name attached by someone else. Of course the major difference in these items is the fifth one is completely out of my control, such is the case for everyone; Someone uploads a nasty photo ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com When you run down the reasons for being on different social networks, so many are clear as day; Facebook connects you with friends and family, Twitter gives us insight into public discourse, and Pinterest illuminates the creative works of the world. For these and a handful of others, the utility of their site is obvious. However, for every thriving network, there are half a dozen useless sites. Topping the list of trivial online communities is LinkedIn Before you get indignant, I freely admit that I — like 300 million others — have a profile that I occasionally update on LinkedIn. At first blush, the utility of the site makes sense: a network for job seekers and business professionals allowing them to network (in the way your dad and college career counselor champion). Thousands of companies use the site to promote their brand and allow job seekers to follow their career opportunities. The problem is, outside of providing a ...

Last Friday I had the unexpected pleasure of taking pictures for the Iowa State University Greenlee School of Journalism's Future's Forum. A couple week's earlier I was given the photog assignment, but few details except for a handful of choice people to photograph. It wasn't until I showed up that I found out it was a Greenlee event (a school I have a little history with). It turns out the "Futures Forum" is a chance for current journalism students to hear from industry execs, ISU grads in the field and  current  students with unique intern experience. This year's panel was made of a senior editor at Better Homes & Gardens, an Ag magazine exec, an graduate who now works at ESPN and a student who recently interned for Rolling Stone and Maxim. For the majority of the forum I was looking for different photography angles, but after the M.C. held a cheer for the recently deceased and beloved professor, Barbara Mack, and announced the topic, my interes...