HPA News
By Barbara Lange, Executive Director
As you see in our NewsLine feature story, HPA has hired a Phil Kubel as the organization’s director. Phil will be joining HPA in this new role starting May 29. The role was created to provide a more regular local presence for HPA, as well as to manage the day-to-day business of HPA. While I am happy to travel cross-country to support HPA, the Board realized that having a person on the ground on a more regular basis was very much needed.
An innovator and entrepreneur, Phil is the perfect person for the position. His background includes production work in both television and film as well as online streaming. He’s very familiar with the notion of production from pre to post. You can read more about Phil in the NewsLine, and I am sure you will get to meet him at an upcoming event – such as NET on June 13 – so be sure to say hi and welcome him into the HPA family.
I am pleased to report that the HPA IMF User Group is now entering into its third year of work! The response from the community has been great over the past two years. In addition to the continuing regular quarterly meetings and telephone calls, the IMFUG is busy working on various promotional activities. These include preparing “roadmaps” for industry exhibitions such as NAB, IBC, SMPTE annual technical conference, and the HPA Tech Retreat. These maps help attendees navigate to IMFUG participant booths on the busy show floor. At the upcoming IBC, the IMFUG will be hosting another session in the conference.
In other HPA news, we are kicking into high gear for the HPA Awards, as entries close for Engineering Excellence (extended deadline May 31!) and open for the creative categories and the announcement is imminent for our Lifetime Achievement honoree. Details on all of these items can be found on the HPA website.
Our Young Entertainment Professionals (YEP) group will be kicking off year four later this summer. Look out for our application process and start thinking about young professionals you can invite to apply for a year of mentoring and HPA knowledge sharing. It’s a terrific program and a great way for HPA to foster the future generation of creative technical professionals.
There’s lots going on at HPA. Glad that Phil will be here to help us get it all done!