A curiously adept designer detective’s random moments of messy minutiae:
Professor Arnholm stopped by to check in on my logo’s progress. Quite calmly he leaned in and observed my work. He paused and then said, ‘that mark will last a long time.’ Longevity is one of the primary goals of graphic design communication. It’s also the toughest one to accomplish. This went down in history as my most treasured moment in my entire fine art and graphic design career that began when I was twelve painting and selling $100 watercolors for family friends.
Even when I was still deep in the trenches with QuarkXPress for my print clients, I always dreamed of the day that Adobe would essentially take the foundation of Illustrator and tune it in such a way that it could be a desktop publishing program like Quark. In 1999 InDesign 1.0 was released. The first time I launched it I was already comfortable at home. It looked exactly like Illustrator, but it had facing pages, and H and Js. I never read the manual because everything was so elegantly and intentionally placed within the UI, unlike Quark’s quirkiness, and far more streamlined.
By the time I was sixteen, I was designing logos for local companies, illustrating restaurant mascots, rendering technical illustrations for amusement park rides, and drawing more than 500 caricatures of my high school senior class, famous actors and comedians, neighborhood swim teams, and even my Mom’s tennis team.
I love that Futura was released in 1927. As most of my colleagues know is that twenty-seven is my lucky number. It’s also the Detective Comics issue number that introduced us to ‘The Bat-Man’ in 1939. You could say that DC is in my blood. Heck, my boss at TWC’s last name was Booth…get it? Phone booth…Superman?
Fun fact: The Weather Channel owned the first Quantel Paintbox sold in the Americas with serial number one. It’s now in the Smithsonian Institution. The first year on-air, TWC’s Art Department won more BDA Awards than anyone else in the country. They even garnered an additional award for winning more than anyone else. I was so lucky to become a small part of the Art Department’s legacy. ET and I are still good friends today.
I worked for TWC full time twice and as a contractor and freelancer many times. They even followed me to Outpost Pictures and Artifact Design for a total of 14 years of creative collaborations. My teammates at The Weather Channel gifted me a special Superman poster scribbled in silver with best wishes when I left to join Artifact Design. My daughter calls me Batman. Edgar Allan Poe and I are birthday twins, and his creation of the Detective genre directly influenced Batman.
In order to get buy in from The Weather Channel Engineering Department I knew I needed to not speak, but fully understand their technical language. When we, as artists, used the two Quantel PaintBoxes we didn’t have to really understand anything about the minutiae of broadcast terminology like NTSC lower field first, 3:2 pulldown, motion blur samples, etc. We just needed to make sure to not use zero black in our graphics.
Luckily a little startup came along called Toolfarm in San Francisco at just the right moment in 1999. They sold After Effects plug-ins and desktop creative software for Macintosh like After Effects, Electric Image Animation System, Commotion, and Final Cut Pro. They were our one stop shop for everything we needed to transition from two Quantel PaintBoxes and two Discreet Flints to our own desktop workstations.
However, TWC Engineering got involved and we ended up building out the hardware with a local Atlanta reseller, Video Central. They provided two Blue and White PowerMac G3s each equipped with a Targa 2000 SDX video I/O card, a 144GB Rorke Data striped array, and ICE accelerator cards for After Effects. The systems always ran far too hot with those two double layered PCI cards so we had to keep the side doors open in order not to overheat. Also the video arrays were highly unstable which was more than likely an issue with the SCSI ATTO cards. I had a gray G3 tower that had a SCSI card, but the documentation specifically noted never to use it. Strange. Why would Apple offer an unstable SCSI port? Weird.
When I was first perusing Toolfarm’s website, one little set of VHS tapes caught my eye, ‘Masters of Visual Effects’ training videos with industry pros like Ron Brinkman who literally wrote the book on digital compositing, and co-founded Nothing Real that brought us the compositing and effects software Shake. Once I studied up on the terminology and put it into action I caught the eye of the Engineering department head who appeared pleased.
My plan had worked, and eventually I found a way to unite multiple departments at TWC, including our Design Group, Facilities, Engineering, and even as far up the food chain as the VP of Production. Our little art department had grown, and our skillsets along with it. I was my Design Director’s right hand man and leader of the Plugged-In workgroup. We researched and evaluated all software and hardware for each year’s capital and monthly expenditures.
The Roman philosopher Seneca once mused, ‘luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’ My entire career was tethered to one connection after another. A myriad of relationships spanning the entire entertainment industry from support and sales to alpha and beta testing and even branding opportunities with some of my favorite folks I met along the way. I started out on a PaintBox, but saw the desktop wave that began with publisher coming hard and fast for video and film. From TWC to Discreet Logic, Toolfarm, Puffin, ICE, RealViz, and Red Giant to Zaxwerks, Adobe, Trapcode, SCAD, and back to TWC, and then onto Artifact Design that led to Outpost Pictures.
Timing is everything, right? I guess I couldn’t have been let go from ICE at any better moment. I got a call the following morning from a friend at CN8 The Comcast Network. “I hear you need a gig,” he said with a chuckle. I obliged so we set forth to win numerous awards together. This was the beginning of the diversification of my broadcast design portfolio. My friend brought me on again when he left Comcast to go work at CBS Channel 3 in downtown Philadelphia. I can still taste those yummy cheesesteaks.
Chatting with Grant Petty for an hour long distance about his first venture into desktop monitoring with the Digital Voodoo D1 Desktop was one expensive phone call. I rang him up from my desk at TWC. Luckily I didn’t get the phone bill. Once he left DV to form Blackmagic Design, I was hired by DV to answer worldwide support calls in my home studio. I was featured as one of the first few Customer Features on BMD.com.
Sometimes the best advice comes in contrast to our dreams and life pursuits. A dear friend warned me not to go into the film industry and work on movies. He also advised that I diversify my portfolio. Sticking to my guns and heeding his advice I kept my place in the broadcast industry, never succumbing to the lure of Hollywood. In Free Guy fashion “I leveled up.” Before I knew it, thirty-three years had passed, and my portfolio had never been stronger with over one-hundred brands under my belt. Not too shabby for a primarily self-taught designer.
I was somehow always tied to Neverland in a dozen of intersecting, dizzying arrays of fantasy flights beginning with my Peter Pan storybook, that I still have today in my home studio. The 1991 Steven Spielberg film, Hook, starred two of my favorite actors, Robin and Dustin. Genius casting decisions. I even lived down the street from Tinkerbell’s high school in Smyrna, Georgia. In 1993 I decorated my UGA graphic design submissions with a scene of Captain Hook asking Tinkerbell ‘where did Vinson bury the treasure?’ Her inked footprints start at the inkwell and traverse to the edge of the folder arriving where x marked the spot at the clasp on the back.
In 1997 I found myself standing just two feet away from Industrial Light & Magic’s Neverland matte painting hanging in their lobby at Kerner Optical. Painted by Yusei Uesugi, this painting was the first matte painting in film history to be projected onto 3D geometry adding additional depth to the illustion. Two years later, in 1999, I began learning ElectricImage Animation System sporting the Knoll Lens Flare plugins. My first EIAS project’s opening shot followed the camera between city buildings with the glowing Knoll flare as the sun for a new morning show on The Weather Channel. In 1999 I replaced the need for the Quantel Paintbox and SGI Discreet Logic Flint with Macintosh desktop tools. That moment began my twenty-seven year love affair with After Effects.
So many friends and colleagues assumed I was a master at Photoshop. The truth was quite different. I watched Brian Maffitt’s AE training VHS tapes. The following morning I opened up AE and realized I could design all of my style frames within the compositing environment in AE. Finally! Back when we were using the PaintBoxes and Flint systems, we built design elements in layered Photoshop files. Then we would ftp them over the network one layer at a time as 24-bit Targa files. If memory serves correctly I believe we had to send separate files for the beauties and their corresponding mattes. The process was so tedious, but a necessary evil.
After being recruited by ICE, I found myself unemployed two months later. They made me an offer to leave TWC I couldn’t refuse. They doubled my salary, and my primary job was to travel around the world giving ICE After Effects demos. Too good to be true, I guess. In hindsight the truth was that they were padding their creative roster in order to court and raise Media100’s bid to buyout their company. I got a call directly from ICE’s CEO, you’re fired. The very next day I got a call from my buddy at CN8 The Comcast network. His first words were, “so I hear you need some work.” So we got started on some show opens for Comcast. When he left to fill the Design Director’s role at CBS3 in Philadelphia we continued our collabs for a few more years.
In 2006 I was tasked by Red Giant Software to design and star in my own version of their Knoll Training DVD. Many of my examples were a gentle nod back to John Knoll’s After Effects training I first witnessed in 2001 when we added Knoll Lens Flare Pro (later Knoll Light Factory) to our AE creative arsenal. In 2008 I designed and edited Red Giant’s NAB reel. The following year I updated the design and my business partner, a master at color grading and riveting storytelling, was the editor.
During the summer of 2009 while in Boston training New England Sports Network’s producers and designers I had an aha moment that first night in my hotel room. I spent an hour or so building out the concept borrowing a little bit of JavaScript from Dan Ebberts’ MotionScript website. The following morning I shared my little rig with NESN. The first thing they said was, “lens flares aren’t 3D.” I replied with a smirk, “they are now.” The truth is they’ve always been 3D going all the way back to my first day with Knoll Lens Flare in Electric Image.
In 2001 I created my first After Effects overview video for Toolfarm. Peder’s Trapcode Shine had just been released, and they needed a quick 5-minute overview. The following spring I got to me the genius behind Trapcode, such a humble, friendly guy. Seven years later Red Giant Software tasked me to create preset packs for Trapcode Particular and Shine. They were bundled with the Trapcode Suite.
I also developed my own original splatter FX engine utilizing Trapcode Particular for After Effects. It included thirty handcrafted splatter textures that I made with India ink and a flick of the wrist in my basement studio. I fully developed the concept that included ten different setups, optional animated drips, and was 3D camera-aware with shading. Red Giant ended up passing on it so I released the thirty textures for free.
Around that same time in 2009 I started developing a new set of tools for AE called Red Giant Galaxy. It included a full toolkit of planets, suns, star fields, constellations, nebulae, asteroids, black holes, event horizons, etc. If you look closely at the Holomatrix commercial you can see some of the asteroids in the backgrounds.
I lived in Atlanta for twenty-two years. Fourteen of those working with the folks that taught me active listening and got me back in touch with my inner empath. I owe the entirety of my broadcast design career to them. We accomplished a great many things together. Most importantly, we evolved and challenged ourselves beyond what we could do alone. We is the way, not just me. It’s not about mine, it’s about us. I owe so much to my many mentors and design directors, but more than anyone I thank my family for always believing in me. They helped me prove to myself that following my dreams wasn’t just possible, it was inevitable as long as I followed my curious inner child that I never let die.
I’d also like to thank Bonnie and my entire GMOA family, everyone at Toolfarm, the Masters of VFX veterans at Puffin Designs, the entire Red Giant Software gang, Ellen Wixted at Adobe Systems, Grant Petty and his Digital Voodoo D1 Desktop, Las Vegas Korean BBQ with Mike Skibra, Pasadena mojitos with Steve Kilisky, and Ken Keagy, CNN and TWC veteran, at CN8 The Comcast Network and later with CBS3 Philadelphia for my first freelance gig the day after Media100 bought ICE and I was let go after working there for only two months.
Be blessed ya’ll. — David, Your TWC Superman
