$NAME(7)	"$AUTHOR"	"Farewell Rave Magazine"

The final issue of Brisbane street press RAVE MAGAZINE came out this
past Tuesday. My father Colin Rankin bought the magazine in 2001 when it
was on the verge of insolvency. I had only just left high school and in
2002 I was in the first semester of a BFA (Film & TV) at QUT, a degree
for which the university had only selected 25 applicants. The lecturers
failed to inspire me, and, much to my parents' dismay, I dropped out
after that first semester. So I left and started working at RAVE in "the
mail room" (a pasteup table next to the office refrigerator) where I'd
send off issues and tear sheets to clients and associates. By the end of
2002 I took on the role of Production Manager, designing the covers in
Corel Draw and laying out the issues in PageMaker. In those days we
would need to print and proof each page on A3 paper (colour pages as
CMYK separations) and, once the issue was complete on Monday night
(deadline day), my dad and I would drive the pages to the printing press
where they would be photographed to form the plates. The whole digital
workflow of desktop publishing was still in its infancy, but soon we
graduated to delivering PostScript files on a ZIP disk (with A3 paper
backups), then one day I was overjoyed to find that we would be
trialling uploading a single multi-page PDF to an FTP server, which
meant no more driving out to the printing press. Another big change was
when I shifted the cover design from Corel Draw to PhotoShop, which
allowed for much more freedom and expressiveness. (A few covers I
experimented with hand-drawn ink designs, scanned and overlaid on the
cover photo. I'm pretty sure this shift prompted a reciprocal step-up of
cover design in street press across the country.)

Being 18 years old and working at the city's coolest street press made
for pretty awesome formative years. This was just before piracy
destroyed the music industry, so the labels were still relatively cashed
up -- I still maintain that 2003 was the best year for music ever. I
have fond memories of Fucky the Frisbee, whose flight from one side of
the office to the other structured our weekly meetings. The staff was
small so we constructed our own AWESOM-O 4000. We had a refrigerator
full of blue Pepsi. Advertising Manager Ross Kingston taught me that man
should be able to cook and sing karaoke. That year Editor Eden Howard
moved to India and new Editor Kate Scott delegated cinema editorial to
me, so I gained the second title of Cinema Editor. In hindsight, this
age is probably too young to be given absolute control over several
pages of editorial -- I gave myself a column, which was intended to
provide coverage for films that I couldn't cover with features or
reviews, but became a ridiculous weekly rant that I'm sure will one day
be used to blackmail me.

Working for my dad was not without its friction; I still lived at home,
he'd drive us to and from work, and the office was open-plan. There were
arguments. When Kate initiated a much-needed redesign, there were a
couple of times I stormed out of the office in tears (over details such
as whether the masthead should have a drop shadow, but on the other
hand, reading the Steve Jobs biography largely validates my position on
such "small" details).

Working for my dad also taught me how to manage a team. I left my
full-time position at RAVE in 2005 to travel, and after subsequently
working for other managers I've come to see just how great my dad is at
leading people -- he leads without looking like it. He doesn't dominate
people, he doesn't shout or give orders, he asks you if you'd like to do
something. He doesn't tell you "do it like this," he asks if maybe we
could try it this way? And which is better, do you think? He gets
everyone to do what needs to be done while making them feel it's what
they already wanted. He understands the fundamental truth of leadership:
you've gotta make people feel that being there is worthwhile. This is a
lesson I've taken to my film sets, and as such I've always tried to make
my productions to feel like a party, of which the director is host. I've
been on other productions that feel like concentration camps, where
people can't wait to wrap. This is not how I want to work, and I'd never
feel okay asking others to work that way.

It was through RAVE that I found great music, great films and great
friends. A lot of people say the internet makes print media irrelevant;
they're mistaken, but it will take a long time for them to realise their
mistake, so it's not really worth the argument. It's sad that RAVE is
gone, and as people are wont to say, it feels like a piece of me is gone
too. But mostly I'm proud of my dad; it wasn't that he couldn't see the
writing on the wall -- he saw it and chose to defy it. He knew he had a
collection of great people putting their heart into something they felt
was worthwhile, and so he kept it going for as long as he could.