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Brad Giblin

Monday 02 Jun, 08

Brad is the young man behind Film Victoria's digital media initiatives. In this interview he explains how important it is to merge technical and creative skills, and why he is so much more than the go-to-guy for router problems.

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Blurb

Name

Brad Giblin

Organisation/business/company

Film Victoria

Position/title

Technical Project Officer

Full time/part time

Full Time

Introductory Excerpt

Digital media is attractive because it is always going to be at the leading edge, and you're got to force yourself to be up there. So it spurs you on and you can't afford to be lax because everyone will catch up to you and when the people on the street know as much as you about the origins of Facebook or why Joost is going to be the next big thing, then you're in trouble.

It is also a really good excuse to buy a lot of gadgets, to always have the latest gear and highest speed internet, and to be the guy in the office who is the go-to guy with regard to anything digital. As much as that can be a chore because it is usually about routers that aren't working, it is also a lot of fun.

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Way Back

Where did you grow up?

I was a Geelong boy, I grew up there. I hit a hurdle at about 15, and eventually moved away when I had finished school. I moved up to Melbourne, to the big smoke, for all the possibilities. I studied at Monash and I bummed around at a few people's houses, then got off my arse and got my own place and have lived in Port Melbourne, South Yarra and Carlton since.

What were the creative career prospects like when you were growing up?

I wouldn't ever have pictured myself doing digital media, partly because I didn't know what it was.

I didn't really know where I was going. I did an IT degree so it could have been anywhere. Geelong is limited in the sense that there are only a few major IT companies that employ more than 50 people, so if you are lucky enough to get into one of those you are looking at an internal path in there rather than jumping round to different companies, just because there simply aren't any.

As a kid, who/what were your three biggest inspirations?

Computers, I think, were the number one thing. I was always into computers and I think my parents handled it right and they never quite gave me enough. So I always wanted a little bit more. I had a Mac at a very early age and I used to play games and do really basic design and stuff like that...And then the internet came along.

There was just so much potential, and it was also really intriguing to me because I'm not the kind of person who sticks to one skill set and does that. It's nice to have something different come along every year and be able to concentrate and lead with something different.

What was your first job?

My first job was managing the IT facilities at my parents' business.

That is a lot of responsibility at a young age!

That was when I was about 14 or 15. I guess there were about two first jobs, I also picked some blueberries. As a 14 or 15 year old in my parents' business, while watching all the companies come in and pitch for decent tenders and roll out decent gear, I was thinking that I should be the person doing that because I didn't think it would cost that much. So I took over that from a fairly early age. And that kind of stemmed from the fact that I used to hang around the business a fair bit, just being a kid, and that was basically just after-school care.

But I was also hanging around the designers and the creative side of the business. I didn't know whether I wanted to be on the IT side or the design side. But my interest was definitely in the middle somewhere.

Do you think you would have had the same sort of career if you hadn't had that break early on?

It is hard to say. One of the reasons I have ended up where I am now is because I really enjoy the IT side of things but I don't enjoy being swamped with it. And I enjoy knowing about everything that is going on in the IT world, and it's that overview that I think I provide to people. But whether I'm working on films or radio or anything else, it basically comes down to how I can help other people do what they want to do with technology. So I think I was always going to do IT because I was interested in computers, but I think I have always wanted to combine the creative side with that. And it is great that there are so many more opportunities in this day and age to do that.

What has your strangest job been?

I don't know what my strangest job is, I haven't had too many. I have been employed as the IT manager at my parents' business (a part time gig) for 10 years now, so that has sort of been an ongoing thing and I haven't needed to seek out bizarre occupations to feed my student alcohol addiction or whatever the case may be. So I didn't really have anything too weird.

So you are one of the lucky or hardworking ones that got straight into the industry?

Yeah. Well after about a six month break. After uni I just decided I was going to be lazy, bum around and do nothing for six months before I got a job. So I decided I would look for a job after filling out slightly inaccurate Centrelink forms for a few months.

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Career Development

Did you do any Uni or TAFE? If so, what & did you graduate?

I did a Bachelor of Information Management and Systems at Monash University. It was a new course when I started it so we were, in some respects, guinea pigs. It was a studio-based course, which was what suited me. We didn't learn with traditional IT disciplines, it was really all about working with other people. So the course was structured in such a way that for each year of the three years you had a unit that would span the entire year, and within that unit you would work with people for the entire year.

So all of it was group work where you had four or five people who worked in your team, and you each sorted out the roles you wanted to do, and that gave rise to working in teams all through uni. And that's invaluable because as soon as you get into the workplace you are going to have to work in a team. To know where you stand, to know what your preferred position is within a team, to know what your individual strengths and weaknesses are, without having to do the hard-yards in that first job, is really quite valuable.

So I finished the degree, and as I said I took a bit of time off afterwards. But for me anyway doing IT was about having the degree rather than the skills. It was a very general kind of degree. We had very little programming or any specific expertise coming out of it, so it was really about &quot;you've got an IT degree, go get an IT job&quot;, whatever that may entail.

Do you think that is important or essential for someone trying to break into the industry, to have a degree?

It's a catch 22. You need a degree but you don't need what you learn from a degree. That's my perspective anyway. I got my first job at a university based on the fact that I'd been doing work in my parents' business. I'm not sure I made it clear on my resume that it was my parents' business or whether i might have selectively neglected that information. I got it based on the fact that I had that experience with all the software, all the platforms, all the troubleshooting from the business systems through to the design and creative solutions. And it was mainly the design because it was the university's School of Contemporary and Creative Arts that I got into. It was having that experience but also having the degree to back it up. To say that this person has a degree, put in the hard yards at uniregardless of whatever you learn it's the fact that you have earned the degree that is more important.

In the digital content industry there is the continual need for up-skilling and self-teaching. How do you approach that?

There is, especially in the creative side of digital media. It's a confusing one because in a lot of manufacturing, which is kind of where I came from, the printing, design kind of business, there is not that much up-skilling.

In digital media is kind of different in that there is no one source of anything. I wouldn't recommend that anyone seek a university to teach them the nuts and bolts of how social networks, digital media, web 2.0 work, because I don't think it is relevant to people. I don't think you can learn that within a university curriculum.

So the one thing you have got to get used to fairly quickly is that that's got to happen out of your own steam. You have to keep up with blogs; with news, from all the good sources; so you are not just up with the latest and greatest in silicone valley, you are also up to date with what the regular person knows about. You are reading newspapers to figure out what the person on the street knows, you are reading blogs and two dozen RSS feeds every day to keep up to date with the technology; the buy outs; the new social networking sites; the new software and service developments; where Google and Amazon are going; where the latest iPod is at.

There are just so many things you have got to keep track of, and you can't rely on anybody else to teach you that. You just have to...do it. Which is fantastic because there are so many aggregators out there that can compile it for you, so it is really just time, getting the right websites to read and making sure you are in tune with a few different audiences.

How did you get your first career break?

Career breaks are one of those things, you don't realise that they are happening until you go to write something in your resume and you think &quot;that's really impressive&quot;. So the advice I'd give to anybody is to think about what you want your resume to look like, and take on the projects and roles that enable you to achieve that.

So there are a few things on my resume that stand out. One is that I have had a really long employment as the IT manager, the other is that I have done a few quite significant projects. They were all things I didn't really have to do, but have enabled me to keep moving up. Rather than just listing jobs on my resume I list really significant achievements within those jobs that demonstrate that I am someone who is willing to step outside the role of the job to do bigger and better things.

It is also imperative that those things are what you want to do as well, and not just what the company wants you to do. So in any role, to find those things that really stick out, that are significant achievements for you, they need to be in a role that is aligned to the organization, so you've both got the same goals, you are both prepared to put in the hard yards. That way you'll find that if you are doing anything that is a lot of effort for you, at least you are going to have the support to go and do that.

What do you think are some of the major stumbling-blocks that people face when putting together resume? Do you see any major mistakes being made by people trying to break into the industry?

One of the things I've found is that it is the ability to list a joband to indicate what within that role made you a valuable employee. Because everybody is going to look at a resume and go &quot;well this person has done x and y,&quot; but at the end of the day they are just roles. It is what you do within those roles which determines whether you are going to be good at whatever else they are pitching you at. To break any role down to show responsibilities and achievements is a good thing, because it gives an employer a potential snapshot of what your responsibilities are, so they can be assured that you are going to be able to manage those in the future. And what your achievements are, which demonstrates added value.

And if you do that you'll get to thinking about what you should be doing to add to those areas, and the type of projects that you might be seeing around work that you might really like to have on your resume in the achievements section. There might be projects on business systems, or for some people it is things like social committees or any kind of thing like that. It is really about tailoring your resume for your next job, but thinking about that when you are in your current role as opposed to trying to find the next job.

Having a forward thinking resume is always good. Keeping track of what you are doing at work, all the projects, the little things that would be suitable for your resume, the speaking engagements, the seminars you organise. Anything that involves a lot of people or a lot of money is good, and being able to demonstrate that on a resume is fantastic. I can say that I was involved in this project, or I can say I was involved in a project and this was my role within a 2 million dollar budget, which is a lot stronger. A lot of people are very ashamed to blow their own trumpet, so have someone who is one of your referees and is a big believer in you to check through and get them to write your resume, or get them to improve your resume in areas that you are not quite happy blowing your own trumpet in.

Why this industry?

Because it is so broad and nebulous at the momentYou have got to keep up to date with basically everything that is happening in Australia and across the globe. And that interests me, and that is a personal challenge because it is about making time to do that kind of thing. And it's only through making time that you can satisfy yourself that you are relatively up to date.

So you like just being on the cutting edge of things?

Yeah. And it's a very privileged position because we tend to see pretty much everything that is happening in Victoria in terms of digital media, so everybody comes to us to either sound out investment or just for feedback essentially. It's a privileged position to be a person who sees the entire happenings of the industry, and who is also in a position to drive that forward, and to put it in a place where it could be world class and sustainable.

What were the three most significant evolutions/changes in your working life?

I guess finishing uni and realising that I had done a lot of IT but that I didn't necessarily want to go into IT, that was a pretty significant one. It forced me to think about how I would find a career in some kind of IT related discipline, because that is what I had a degree in, and still have something that I really enjoyed.

And that led me to the creative side. So I guess that stemmed from the fact that I was working with graphic designers from a young age. That also led to a number of other things: doing radio; doing mobile phone video recording in Iceland; doing just bizarre little projects because it tied into the creative side, and I was able to use IT expertise to pull those kinds of things together.

There was a point where I had create a position for myself, because everything was IT or digital media. So I sought to find a middle ground and basically worked myself into that through taking on IT roles and expanding that into research and everything, podcasting, animation, live performance, collaborating with dancers and sound artists and all that stuff.

Do you feel there is an inherent abrasion between the creative aspects of the digital content industries and technical aspects?

I think universities are slowly tackling it. People are probably becoming more aware, especially in areas like web design, that the creative people have to have the technical background. For digital media the programmer is the new designer. You can't design something without an indication of how you are going to make it work, of how the user is going to interact with it. Nothing is 2D and read-only. Everything is read-write, and you need to create interaction and to do that you need to be a programmer in some capacity. Maybe that doesn't agree with you, and maybe you just need to learn really basic action script to make flash animation, or maybe you are going to get buried in Ajax and the whole web 2.0 ideology. But essentially to be a designer you need to be somewhere on that whole spectrum of programming, and every major agency is looking for people who have both skill sets.

It is a real opportunity for people of this age, say 15-25, to step into that, because the senior designers, the senior anything in a company, don't necessarily have the programming expertise. Yet all the companies are moving that way. So it is a real opportunity rather than an issue at the moment, but I'd still say that you have to get off your own arse and do it, because the universities aren't going to help you.

Did anything jeopardise your career in its early stages?

You jeopardise your own career. It's hard to stay motivated all the time. It' probably hardest to stay motivated when everything is really working for you. I think adversity is the one thing that has really helped me to push forward. Whether that is adversity in terms of getting out of a job what you are trying to achieve, or just a general dissatisfaction with people around you or the management or the constraints of working in government or education or whatever that might be. I think you've really got to work at being challenged by that as opposed to being dragged down by that.

What was the best piece of professional advice you received in the early stages of your career?

I've got no idea, but I did hear an interesting one the other day, which is &quot;never argue with a fool, because they'll drag you down to their level, and then trump you with experience.&quot;

If you could thank anyone from your professional past, who would it be and what would you say to them?

Probably all of my managers. In some regards I've had some fantastic managers, and I was very lucky in a previous job to have a few really impressive and supportive managers who were also very good leaders. And they were the ones who set me up on the path of &quot;if you want to do something you can do it,&quot; as opposed to &quot;if you want to do something that is outside the scope of your job, you can't do it.&quot; There were probably three in particular, including some high up managers, who gave me opportunities to do management courses and leadership courses and things like that.

There have also been other managers who maybe haven't been quite so supportive, but even a bad manager can be a really great learning experience, because the more you can pick up what a bad management trait is, the more you are able to steer away from it. I think it is fantastic if you are in a situation where you can analyse your managers and be very critical but try to fix typical management mistakes early in your career, it probably means you will be a better manager.

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Now

How would you briefly describe your role? What are your responsibilities?

I work within Film Victoria. We have what used to be called the Digital Media Fund, which is now just part of our general investment side of Film Victoria. And that is funded by the State Government to around 2 millions dollars per financial year. We aim to fund and invest in digital media projects that have original, marketable and innovative components

So through that we are investing money across mobile, online and games platforms. We are funding things like animation, we are funding things like new technology platforms for mobile that enable people to make animation and games quicker. We are funding things like VJ software, or essentially anything to do with digital media, anything you can think of.

That is kind of why the job is so intriguing. It is a huge scope, and it is obviously a lot of technical experience and a lot of marketplace experience that we need to be able to make reasonable decisions about whether we should invest in something or whether it is not quite ready, or what sort of support it needs to achieve market-ready status.

One of my focuses is trying to get traditional media producers interested in working with digital media producers. That is an enormous opportunity for younger generations because they understand how to target generation C, or soon to be 0-30 year olds. There isn't much evidence that existing producers get it, so we are trying to push the industry forward in that way, and we can provide funding to help form these relationships and create cross platform content.

For some of our games companies we can invest amounts of up to $500,000 in the development of original IP. So this creates significant employment opportunities within the state, and this is for people who generally go off overseas and sell their product to big publishers like EA, CapCom and Sony. And that applies to mobile development as well, we have some world-leading mobile games development studios in Melbourne.

What are the best and worst aspects of your job?

Seeing the wide scope of everything that comes in, the variety between different applications, is a great thing. Being able to sit down with some very talented, experienced people, and to discuss that in detail, and to discuss the investment potential and the market potential is very beneficial to me. As well as that I can bring a lot to the technical and the new-media, trans-media, cross-media, web 2.0 side of the concepts. The people I work with are a big part of it.

I guess...the worst part is just not having enough time to pursue all the other concepts that I have.

What are three essential attributes someone in your position needs?

I think it is being up-to-date with everything, and that only comes with following blogs, following the industry at such great detail for maybe 5+ years. A good place to start for that kind of thing are the likes of Mashable and Slashdot. I'd say the ability to have a high level perspective: a strategic leadership perspective as well as a hands-on perspective. So making sure you are involved with media creation but also trying to take a step back and figure out where it's heading in the future.

And having a digital media creative side and a technical side is important, enabling you to figure out whether things can or can't happen. In a lot of cases that ties back into what's possible in the future, because creatives will have all the magnificent ideas, and everything is a possibility, whereas the technologists will very much focus on the path for technology and how it is going to develop to get to a certain point. So being in the middle lets you see it a bit more clearly in terms of what is possible with regard to IT or digital media, and make better judgements based on that.

If you, in your position now, were interviewing your younger self back at your first professional job interview, would you have given yourself a job? Why / why not?

I always like to think about whether I'd employ me, going into a job interview, because I think it gives you a good understanding of what you need to address, what the bigger concerns might be for the company. And it is good to get that straight in your own head before you do sit down and have a chat with people.

I think I would employ me. It's a very hard job and I think part of the reason why I was suitable is because I have come out of education into government, it is a very similar bureaucracy, similar paper trails and public responsibility. It is being organised at that level, being able to write reports for the board, the ministers, or whatever the thing of the day is. Yeah, it certainly suits me.

I guess if I were sitting down and employing me it would be for different reasons, it would be more for the reasons I would want to be employed, which is, as I touched on, the investment side, and being able to provide that leadership for Film Victoria in terms of the digital side of things. And I'm sure they were looking for things like report writing and the government stuff a bit more than I'd like. It's what you've got to do to get into it.

What do the next 12 months hold for you?

I'm not really sure. I think I'll probably go off and start a few little websites. I acknowledge I am a creative person, I do a bit of programming but I know that I can't do the whole lot, so I'm looking for programmers, in uni or recent grads, who are willing to pitch in to ideas to basically start a suite of interesting ideas. Then see what gets commercialised, see what revenue we can generate from that. So I have a bunch of ideas that I am working on, and if I can find the right talent I'll be pursuing those.

I'll probably also continue to occasionally make media on a bunch of different platforms. I'll also see where the funding for my current position goes. I think it is a good place to be because there are real opportunities for industry in terms of combining the digital and traditional media workflows and creatives, and to emerging producers. So there is a huge responsibility for the state agency to step up and hopefully I can be a significant part of that direction.

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Overall

What drives you?

Carving an area out for myself that I'm passionate about and can ideally be recognised for. I think we've all got to do that to some extent, to find something that is individual and to find your little niche. For me that's keeping up to date with so many different technologies, facts and figures. When someone comes to you about digital media, whatever your specific area is, you can show them that you're an expert in the field. I guess it is being able to provide that one source, to be the go-to person in your profession or industry of choice.

Because eventually it boils down to respect and recognition, rather than money, that is what I think we seek in our careers.

Who is your biggest inspiration now?

Probably just technology in general: my N95 (Nokia Mobile) or my Macbook or something like that. Just ridiculously well designed things, like Delicious Library, del.icio.us, or really good couches.

Is there anything you wish you'd done differently in your career?

Not yet. I'll probably look back in 5 years and say "I should probably have done an MBA, or done something like that."

There is one thing I'd like to be able to do, and that is to be more thorough in the implementation of things than I am. I'm more of the "think about stuff" than "actually do stuff" type person, and it is quite hard to keep the day-to-day stuff going. There are projects that I run from start to finish, and they start off really fantastically in terms of ideas and scope and then they kind of peter out while just trying to get the thing done because I really lose motivation.

The thing I wish I'd done differently is probably to find more people to support me in those roles, because I think there are definitely business opportunities in finding people who are just exceptionally well fitted to each other.

What advice would you give eager beavers keen to make it in your industry?

Make sure you understand what you are talking about when it comes to new media, social networks, any kind of thing that you hear buzzwords around. You really have to understand why it is important, why people use it, value it, rather than just to understand what the service is. You'll find that everybody will be talking about it, but what will set you apart and give you the break will be the fact that you understand how it can be used, how you can target people through it, regardless of whether you are going into producing animation for mobile phones or documentary for online distribution, or whether you are going into ad agencies. You really need to be aware of why people use technology, and not just that it is a fad but where it is going. And that will give you the head-start.

If you could have a coffee with anyone at all this arvo, who would it be?

Probably Steve Jobs or Jonathan Ive, the guy who designed the iPod.

Also Andy Baio, the guy that runs Waxy.org. We have the same interests, so he does all the hard work scanning the internet and I just follow him.

And what would you talk about?

I think it would be really interesting to have a chat with someone who could see technology on the scale that Steve Jobs can.

One of the things that has struck me recently has been that you can watch those dodgy 80's videos about technology, and you look back and think "oh my god, how could they be so wrong?" There have been a few that I have seen recently and the presenters and nearly everybody got it wrong, except some like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs which just shows what kind of perspective they have on the industry.

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