User:Stevetuf

= Profile =

Current Situation
Hi, I am Steve. I write for a living. I am currently working on a few short articles for a commercial Internet site, rewriting some copy somebody wrote and I have a 500 page novel in the works that covers themes of reincarnation over several centuries and across oceans. Dream on! I started a screenplay about the life of Antonio Vivaldi, an 18th Century composer who was the resident instructor for a music school of girl orphans in Venice, called the Ospedale della Pieta. Some of the finest Italian baroque music came from the pen of Antonio Vivaldi and he leaves a musical legacy that enters the lives of all kinds of different people.

I take on whatever work I can find or bid for, and I really enjoy the challenge!

Computer Technical Support and Technical Writing
What I bring to the table is over twenty years of supporting MS Windows, Unix and Linux, and Apple Macintosh systems. I spent some time developing technical documents for Intuit's Financial Institutions Division here in California. Also, I have a degree in English and pride myself on great English and perfectly constructed sentences! I write for several wikis, having started a wiki for my firm while I was at Intuit that was a resounding success because I had the blessing of those who had control of the organization. I consider this to be my legacy to them, and I have confirmed that people look here first for answers to complex technical configuration problems.

But most of all, I really enjoy writing. And this is what I am doing most of all right now.

Teacher of Video Editing and 2 Second Stop-Frame Animation
I have spent much of my working life in the broadcast and entertainment field. For over six years, I worked aboard the mv Pacific Princess as an assistant to the Cruise Director and, before that, I was working for both the BBC and Thames Television in London. Later, I taught students how to create short animated or live videos, using the technology which was around at that time. (Having cut my teeth on manual caption production for British television, I find all the latter digital video techniques remarkably easy in comparison!)

One day, a group of students I taught in Great Britain decided to spend a day creating an environmental message video and they enlisted my help. I didn't have to help them much. They had a clear concept and started the work at around eight am. By five o'clock, they had a two minute video, which was a great piece of animation. They were three fresher girls. Two had worked the rostrum camera and set up the staging area and the third girl positioned herself (she actually lay down on her back) in the area where the action was to be filmed. The animation video took a common theme of the day and focused on the destruction of the environment by mankind's pollution. The girl started with a smile on her face, and this was augmented by the serenity all around her, where there were green fields, trees, plentiful vegetation, flowers and pleasant scenery. As the day wore on, the other girls slowly "loaded" face and body with symbolic artefacts of pollution, black coal (to symbolize the fossil fuel usage), lumps of concrete (small but big enough to convey the message!) and reasonably friendly (to their co-worker) items of pollution like cartons of used food and empty cigarette packets. They also began to paint her face grayer and grayer. Gradually, the girl's face was "loaded" with symbolic asphalt and concrete, and slowly the smile drained from her face. The resulting video was really meaningful and won a prize for creative thinking! It was a very rewarding experience working with those three fresher girls that day and even though I was there to help them with the technical aspects of getting the video produced using stop-frame animation, I got a lot out of the experience!

Web Sites
Apart from my own Web site at Steve's New Life Book, I like to help people create great web sites, and, I have managed to help a number of people, including Nergis Kern's SL Experiments site which is another wiki in development and which is a major initiative and focus point for developing language learning and teaching in Second Life.