Vulcan Video Exit Interviews: Expertise, What We’ve Lost & Greatest Employee Picks Ever

We are wrapping up our series Vulcan Video: The Exit Interviews with the last few chapters of the featurettes as well as a complete upload of all the submitted videos from the entire project. You can watch the raw files here.  You can watch not only the full comments of the people we’ve featured in the series, but you can also see some of the videos from people whose work just did not cut well, usually because the sentiment did not need to be adulterated. We’d encourage you to check these out.

But here are the final edits in the series. We start off with a celebration of the scholarship of Vulcan Employees and their joy in helping customers find movies they might like. Of course now we have algorithms, but back then we had to rely on WEIRD GENIUSES. We were so lost, weren’t we?

Next we have a summing up from Danica Steinhauser about Vulcan, how it supplanted her actual film-school education, how it gave a person like her a home, and how it will be missed. This one is liable to hit you right in the vicinity of the heart area.

And finally here is the last Easter Egg of the bunch, in which Luke Rife and Danny Benson talk about some of the Employee Picks sections. These were the special shelves that were sometimes just: “Joe Schmo Recommends” and sometimes thematic selections of three or four movies, think: “Heavy Metal Horror” or “Getting Medieval.” The piece ends with Danny recounting what must surely be the greatest Employee Picks shelf of all time – a legitimately brilliant selection.

Thanks so much to all the Vulcans who sent in videos for this project, and my apologies to all the folks we couldn’t get in touch with. Vulcan was a tremendously important part of what has made the Austin film culture so special and so completely unique. The outlaw scholarship, the lack of pretension, the incorporation of personality into curation… these are all aspects we hope to carry on in our own work and we honor all Vulcans everywhere for lighting the way.

Photo credit: Randi Adams