This is what I have always wanted to do.

...and I don't mean drink whiskey

Put up or shut up

In 1985 I bought an Air Force Compressor and an IWATA HP_B airbrush, the first of many IWATAS.  I had a head full of 80s imagery from the pages of PAPER MOON and ideas from the pages of William Gibson, who I had recently discovered and who I thought was a prophet of the coming age of technology.  I had been dabbling with airbrush art but had suffered from a dearth of quality tools to work with.  With the purchase of the Compressor and the airbrush I had no further excuses.  I had board, I had paint and I had the tools.

It was time to put up or shut up.  I launched on 5 years that shaped the face of my life to date, it led from a duplex on Arden Way in Sacramento to Skywalker Ranch.

I have a secret though, I never really wanted to be an artist, I wanted got be a filmmaker.  I want to tell stories.  Specifically I wanted to be a Documentary filmmaker.  Like everyone else with these inclinations at the time though I got distracted by VFX, then by a career in computer games.  Then to the transition of Computer Game development from Geekdom, to Rockstar to multinational commodity, the guts of it simply off-shored.

Fast foreword through a lot of years I would rather forget to the present day.  I am working eveyrday now in the field I actually went to college to study..when Carter was President.  I now have a camera I can hold in my hand that will shoot feature quality work.  After years of working for other people though, years of abusing my body, years of fighting demons and holding onto things from my past I should have let go long ago I am only missing one thing.

I am missing a place to point my Camera and I am missing a story to tell.  So what do I do?

After all, it is time to put up or shut up.

...is a SECOND Chance Really a THIRD CHANCE or does the counter reset?

Up early again, but I went to bed early so I expect that makes it normal.  I went to J last night and told him that the animations I am working on were going to take longer, amazingly enough he was understanding.  I must confess that is a trait in a boss I am for the most part unfamiliar with. Still, it inspires me to push all that harder.  I haven't felt as "project motivated" as I do these days.  Not since Lucasfilm in fact.

It is odd to compare current gig to LFL, one was a true dream job that most people would call just that, this one is as a camera man and animator for a start up but to me it is more then valid.

Not many people get a second chance, let alone TWO second chances, but that is what I feel as if I have gotten of late.

The FIRST second chance came when I got a chance to work at VELOCE MOTORS WEST, working on a lot of amazing vintage race cars for some really nice people.  Unfortunately I was not up to the task with that job, it was a dream that had come true some 23 years too late.  It is not that I believe in the agist mantra that drives our society as such but it is a simple physical fact that hanging upside down in the cockpit of a Chevron sports racer trying to feel your way to removing a stuck 1/4"-20 Nyloc in a piece of $4000 fiberglass is something of a young man's job.

When I realized, back when Carter was in the White House, that I wasn't going to be the next Niki Lauda I sold my race car and went back to college.  What I went back to college to study was video production, filmmaking and communication.  So it only seem right that the next second chance I got involved all those things.

I made my first regular 8 movie when I was about 11, won my first award for editing when I was 17.  I went to Santa Monica in 1987 to try and get into the film industry.  I took my original job at Lucasfilm with the hopes that I would find my way from the games side to the film side (didn't happen).

When I got back to California after my adventures in Austin I got involved with a WEB series for my pal Taunya Gren.  The work I did was not my best but it served to re-light the flame of my interest. Special effects, merged with film...that was where some smoldering embers of passion remained in my heart, still burning in the part of my soul where they were ignited during an evening showing of JASON & THE ARGONAUTS at the WESTERNER drive in Rialto California (located at the end of Route 66).