The construction industry is big business, involving hundreds of professions and specialty areas. This program offers a fast-paced survey of the skilled construction trades, providing a sense of the diversity of jobs available, as well as comparing the wages of construction trades to other industries. Along with dozens of scenes from construction projects on a variety of scales, apprentices and journeyman workers discuss what they enjoy about their...

Tool and die makers design, craft, modify, and repair dies, forms, cutting tools, jigs, and fixtures. This program takes a look at the skills and traits that go into becoming a tool and die maker; commonly used machinery, like drills, pedestal grinders, lathes, and welding equipment; and the impact of technology on the trade as it's performed today. Also, a pair of apprentices-one male, one female-talk about the tool and die making experience.

HVAC is a fifteen-minute video which is part of the series, Vo/Tech: Ins and Outs.This fast-paced, entertaining, and intriguing series introduces several occupations in the vast career pathway of vocational and technical trades. Viewers are taken on a journey through many different facets of vocational interest areas including welding, masonry, electrical, residential construction, and HVAC. Each fifteen-minute program focuses on one of these particular...

The 400-acre Storm King Art Center is America's premier outdoor museum of post-1945 sculpture-and home to the works of more than a hundred of the world's top talents. Through interviews, archival footage, and film clips of sculptors in action, this program offers a glimpse into the creative process of some of the century's most influential artists while presenting a magnificent visual survey of the encyclopedic Storm King collection. Featured sculptors...

Glass and ceramic are some of the oldest man-made materials. This program demonstrates two traditional glass-making techniques: glass blowing and the art of stained glass windows. It also follows the production of industrial ceramics, explaining that this material is constantly being used in new applications. Finally, we are shown the expanded use of glass in architecture, where it is increasingly replacing wood and stone.

Produced in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's exhibition of the same name, this lively program explores the evolution of late-20th-century ceramics. Using interviews and myriad examples of their works, leading figures in the field, including Ruth Duckworth, Wayne Higby, John Mason, Ron Nagle, Otto Natzler, Richard Shaw, and Peter Voulkos, discuss such major themes as Abstract Expressionism, Funk, vessels, form and function, and...

This beautifully filmed program by Richard L. Harrison explores the work, creative process, and philosophical perspective of award-winning ceramist Paul Mathieu, whose multilayered works in porcelain defy conventional boundaries of craft, sculpture, and representation. Different stages of the ceramics-making process are spotlighted as Mathieu creates an intricate stacking dinner service called The Arrows of Time inspired by physicist Stephen Hawking's...

For decades, women have enjoyed professional success and personal satisfaction at every level of the home building industry, including light commercial construction and maintenance. Drawing on interviews with both women and men, this video presents some of the many opportunities for women in the building-related trades. In two segments, the program explores how they got their starts, what they like about their work, and what motivates them, as well...

Getting hired as a carpenter, electrician, manicurist, or any other tradesperson requires the same professional attitude that all job candidates must show. This video explores essential self-marketing practices that transform job-seekers into wage-earners, focusing on the best ways to display valuable skills and personality characteristics. With straightforward explanations, helpful graphics, and interviews with job-search experts and real-world employers,...

Almost all of us have a tradesman or craftsman - a butcher, baker or candlestick maker - somewhere in our ancestry, and Adèle Emm's handbook is the perfect guide to finding out about them - about their lives, their work and the world they lived in. She introduces the many trades and crafts, looks at their practices and long traditions, and identifies and explains the many sources you can go to in order to discover more about them and their families....