I was a junior in high school when I got my second job ever. A part time job, after school and weekends shooting high school sports and editing highlight reels. My first time to work with a real high-end video camera, not my grandma's VHS camcorder. This was around 1990, still back in the analog world of tape and AB edit controllers. I worked for a production studio who had a lot of nice toys and it was hard to stay away! A year or so later, while in my last year of high school, that production studio got a really cool piece of gear called a Video Toaster. Remember those things? A company called NewTek surfaced and pretty much plowed their way into the world of video, changing the DNA of television production forever. The Video Toaster was a live production switcher, let you add all kinds of cool transitions, DVEs and character generation, animation. I was on top of the world. This boost of creativity was just what I needed to make more… to BE MORE.
One night while up at work I discovered an application part of the Video Toaster suite called Lightwave 3D. I had never seen anything like it. To this day I have a hard time describing the unbelievable impact that program has had on my life. Have you ever made one of those timelines of your life? You know, those that have the major milestones that form and change the path of your life and set you on a course forever? Yeah, Lightwave 3D is on mine. It's the program that brought you amazing visual effects in hollywood blockbusters and tv shows. Real "Movie Magic" at it's finest. I remember staying up at the studio after school and on weekends designing animations and rendering them to tape frame by frame. I spent hours, days, weeks learning as much as I can about this Lightwave 1.0, read the manual cover to cover 10 times, fully engrossed myself almost unnaturally until my eyes bled. I called NewTek's technical support just to hear them talk. I never needed their help, I just called to chat. Those guys were celebrities to me. My childhood up to this point was spent designing graphics, drawing pictures, creating pixels on the screen, animating things. I knew that I wanted to be the one to draw the awesome graphics and animations that amazed me.
I enrolled in the graphic design program at Louisiana Tech University. I was headed for greatness. All I could think about and wanted to do is get a job as a visual effects artist. That was it. That was my passion, my dream, my life and my path. While in school I continued my part-time job at the production studio. I got so good at graphics and animation that they offered me a full time job doing just that, graphics and animation. My job would entail doing animated show openers for television, commercial animated logos, morphs and graphics. I was at a crossroads. I was in school to get a job doing what I love, yet a company just offered me the job doing what I love. What do you think I did?
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