A letter to Teachers (From Da Cage)

Hello Teachers,

I know things have been crazy this semester so I just wanted to give everyone an update on the equipment cage. As of the sending of this e-mail, I personally spent a great deal of extra time today in the cage organizing, polishing, and updating everything. I know it has taken a while but I can now officially say that we are at where we should have been from the start. It is my hope in writing this that we can maintaining the cage in this state so that the workers can better serve the students on their upcoming projects.

As many of you know, we have A LOT of new cage workers this semester. Because of this, we had to create a ton of changes in how we are handling procedures. Janna (janna.hochberg@gmail.com) is in charge of rentals on Mondays and Thursdays. Everyone else isn't. Think of her as new the Adrian. Everyone other than her working in this room is there to attend repairs and keep things organized. Please do not ask anyone other then Janna directly for reserving equipment for your class, she is keeping the books. She needs to know the Monday or Thursday before your class what equipment you will need so we can put it on hold and have it ready for you. If you don't, there is no guarantee what we will have and whoever is there in the cage can only give you what is left over. The only except to this rule is if a student needs a specific piece of equipment that we feel is better off serving their needs. That is why it is so important that we have a heads up.

The best way to get around all this is to just have the student who is doing the work in your class get the equipment for him/herself. That way THEY are responsible for the equipment. I know you guys can't see things from our end but doing it this way helps keep the cage in order to better serve the students. As of right now, every cage workers knows that the first thing they do in the morning is check the studio (room 223) for equipment. If you use equipment for your class from now on, it will be noted what is taken out and expected to be returned afterwards. There is only two places your rented equipment should be, the cage or in the bucket in 223. PLEASE DO NOT PUT EQUIPMENT IN THE ADJUNCT OFFICE. Most of the cage workers do not have access to this room and equipment is often forgotten about or thought of as missing. We don't want to have to tell a student a teacher lost their equipment.

Things aren't like before when it was just me, Adrian, and Jesse running the cage. We are short staffed, over booked and walking a thin wire. A lot of equipment was broken at the end of last year and we are still trying to bounce back from this lack of care. It is my hope that our new way or running things this semester will prevent things like that from happening again. This system is the only thing standing in the way of complete chaos breaking out. We ALL have to take a little pride in the way to handle our equipment and clean up after ourselves. Every miss-use is a burden on another teacher or student coming after us. We ALL need to show a little common courtesy and take care of our equipment because in the end, it is all that we have. I hope this clears up a lot of the confusion as to what is going on in this crazy room.

Thanks for your time,
Sal Pesce - Cage

P.S. The Film Club has been working very hard on building a forum for the students (http://msufilmclub.forumexpress.org) to use as a networking site throughout the department. We have since posted great information on equipment there that you can refer your students to as a reference. It is our hopes that we can get the teachers involved and support us by posting information on the site similar to how you use blackboard, but shared for all of our filmmaking students. Instead of posting things every semester for just the student in your class, we now have a place that will keep that information for the whole department to use. Networking is important as a filmmaker and we want to encourage the use of this website as a way for all of us to communicate.