Thirty-three years ago I opened Adobe Illustrator for the first time at University of Georgia’s graphic design department’s Macintosh computer lab in Athens. We were tasked with designing our logo in Professor Ronald Arnholm’s Typography course. I designed my Vinson logo — seen above in my website’s masthead — in ten minutes. I saw it in my mind and then began typing in v-i-n on top and s-o-n on the bottom. Spending so much time with stencils as my concentration in AP Art my senior year in high school trained my eyes to see positive and negative spaces simultaneously. What I loved most about the direction I took with my logo was the subtle nod to the Yin and Yang with the dot over the lowercase letter i and the inner dot of the letter o. I was in a focused flow state while sleuthing my solution to the exercise. My birthday twin, Edgar Allan Poe, would have certainly enjoyed my art of deduction in finding the true solution.
The graphic designer’s most parallel pursuit is that of the curiously adept detective deducing all angles of minutiae down to one, pure solution. “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I was naturally drawn to the Futura font family for its sans serif, geometric qualities. It was the first font choice I made. Futura was designed by Paul Renner in 1927. It was released by Bauersche Gießerei foundry in Germany, founded in 1837. My logo has seven pieces and two dots that are not perfect circles but vertically oblong giving them a touch of motion and whimsy. That was a small detail my prolific professor noticed immediately. He observed that they shouldn’t be perfect circles because they would lose their visual tension and energy if perfectly rounded. I heeded his advice and wrapped up my design. As I mentioned above, my logo has a hidden 27 in the two dots and seven pieces. Also Futura was born in 1927, and The Bat-Man arrived in Detective Comics issue number 27. That’s my lucky number. My universal number is 3. 3 to the 3rd power is 27. Call it fate, I guess, or just three groovy synchronicities.
“I’ve always spoken out, believing passionately about building solid, fortified foundations first before ever moving ahead and investing in the creative analog and digital gear necessary to earn a living in the arts. Deeply appreciating color theory, anatomy, photography, and perplexing mathematical theorems equips us with a natural springboard.”
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
“Adobe After Effects immediately replaced my need for Photoshop, and more importantly was the keystone of my entire compositing and motion graphics career. After twenty-seven years and multiple years of highly discounted Creative Cloud subscriptions it was finally time to give thanks, say our goodbyes and part ways. AE is still with me in versions 5.5 and 9.”
As students we got to ride the first wave of what would soon become the desktop revolution takeover in the world of print. But these were just the first few baby steps. Keep in mind that this was back in the early to mid-90s when Photoshop didn’t even have layers yet. They weren’t introduced until version 3. I only used 2% of Illustrator’s capabilities primarily to design iconography and logotypes. I began with napkin sketches and then hopped into Illustrator laying down basic shapes. Then I would test drive different fonts looking for just the right personality for the mark’s identity. Next I would outline the fonts and take them into the sculpting phase with the pen tool. I used Pathfinder extensively for cleanup. Suddenly I lost my focus as a fax machine started humming and screeching in the recesses of my mind. I was back at UGA meeting with Professor Williams, avid skydiver and old-school stone letterer, as he read the facsimile message. Little did I know my fate would soon be sealed.
That seemingly innocent fax from The Weather Channel was about to rock my world. Their friendship with UGA’s graphic design school ran deep. Each year they reached out requesting that Professor Williams, chair of the Graphic Design Department, to send his top students to interview for what would prove to be a job opportunity of a lifetime. Two of us made the trek to Atlanta to interview for the designer position in their Art Department. All I could focus on during my drive to Atlanta was why in the world would I want to work at a broadcast network, especially The Weather Channel? The Design Director of the on-air Art Department met the two of us at the door welcoming us into their unfamiliar world of broadcast television. We were in for a real treat. With each introduction I began to feel a shift in my mind. By the time we made the final round meeting up with the print designer, I felt at home. These were my people, and a big kahuna-sized tidal wave was about to drop me into the barrel.
Why did I take the job with the weather weenies? Two things: the people and the toys. We were a motley mix of artists and designers working four day ten hour shifts while sharing two Quantel PaintBoxes. Painting with light on a television screen was such a life-changing experience that immediately felt so familiar taking me back to when I was eleven. Back in 1983 my parents bought me a Commodore 64. My first digital artwork painted and plotted pixel by pixel with the arrow keys was a portrait of Indiana Jones from Raiders of the Lost Ark, my favorite film of all time. Quite honestly, it was watching their artists giving us a demo of those two blackmagic boxes of digital alchemy that sealed the deal for me. They also had a little Mac in the corner running Photoshop, my secret weapon that gave me access to building design elements just as I did in college. It was the perfect companion to Harriet.
By the mid-90s Photoshop finally gained layers with version 3. I’d apply effects on various elements that I sent to the PaintBoxes for final animation and compositing. My crew mates inquired how did I achieve a particular look or style. Photoshop, of course. Up to that point most of the veteran artists had only used it for camera ready artwork ingest. While most of the team welcomed my curious stylings, there was one that didn’t take too nicely to me. I was half their age, cocky for sure, and new nothing about broadcast except to question everything. I still remember designing my first video title card for a segment called “Rose Basics.” Rose was set in Helvetica Bold tracked tightly with each character kissing the next. Basics was set in lowercase Snell Roundhand going against the guidance of one of my new teammates. They said that they stayed away from serif fonts because they were too thin for television. I proved them wrong and also learned a little trick. Blur the text just a touch and it stopped ringing on the screen.
Somehow that experience gave me such a rush of childhood memories, I felt like it was almost Christmas morning. During my drive back to Athens I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear. I was offered the job just a day or two later, passed the drug test, and began packing up. I moved on Christmas day 1995 into my Vinings apartment in Atlanta located at the top of Overlook above Vinings Village and New York Pizza that made the biggest, tastiest pizzas I’d every eaten. There was also a sushi restaurant called Orient Express, quite fitting because our table was just twenty feet from the train tracks. Not a retired line, either. It was active and so loud when the trains would roll by every hour or so each afternoon. Believe it or not it was actually kind of charming albeit deafening, too.
Just around the time I got out of college and started working at TWC there was another desktop revolution coming hard and fast. Compositing and visual effects, video and film, would be forever changed moving the primary tools from $100,000+ black box Quantel and SGI workstations to small, adept Rebel Mac units popping up everywhere. I spent two years hopping on and off of our two PaintBoxes and one tiny little Mac in the corner running Photoshop for camera art input and the Gateway to our Meteorlogy department’s on-air system. Our art department’s artists and designers shared these two PaintBoxes for years. The version I learned was called “Harriet.” She had 383 frames in a Ramcorder for immediate access.
One afternoon I visited one of the senior designers on the fifth floor. He showed me the newest addition to our creative arsenal: two SGI workstations running the same software that ILM used for Jurassic Park. I asked my buddy what it would take to be able to hop onto these two new systems, and he looked at me and bluntly offered this advice: “simple, read the manual.” So I read the manual in one night. I was mesmerized at the particle systems, lights, and animation curves. I couldn’t put the manual down until I read the last page. That next morning I got to work. About a week or two later I was tasked to train another artist on the Flint so we could handle all of the final compositing for the Pittard Sullivan brand redesign. This move allowed us to keep the finishing in house and also keep the cost way down.
I spent about sixteen months with the two Discreet Logic Flints and SoftImage3D Extreme. A handful of us were fortunate enough to travel to Tennessee to Marshall Graphics Systems to learn SoftImage. In order to move past the limitations and managing the shifts it took for our eight artists we needed a new solution beyond these two I made the first call of many to a new company called Toolfarm in San Francisco, founded in 1999. Perfect timing was an understatement. We blazed the trail even ahead of our own engineers knowing full well that the future was moving in a seismic shift to off-the-shelf solutions loaded up on modest Macintoshes.
We modeled our own band of rebels based on Industrial Light and Magic’s creative desktop gear like Electric Image Animation System, After Effects, Photoshop, Commotion, and Puffin Designs plugins like Knoll Lens Flare Pro for EIAS and Photoshop, and renamed Knoll Lens Flare Pro when it became available for After Effects in 2001. There were also two other plugin sets by Puffin Designs for AE, Composite Wizard and Image Lounge. Our two ICE cards helped immensely with heavy renders. Later on we added more tools for AE from RE:Vision Effects and the Foundry.
In order to get our engineers on board with our radical plans my first step was solving the import and export of Digi-Beta footage to and from the Macs. We also needed true engineer-grade monitoring. It didn’t take long to find the solution. One afternoon, after wrapping up a session on the Flint for a brand redesign with Pittard Sullivan, I called Grant Petty at Digital Voodoo in Victoria, Australia. I inquired about his D1 Desktop for After Effects running on Apple’s Macintoshes. We chatted it up for half an hour. Luckily I didn’t get the phone bill. :) A year or two passed when Grant left the company he founded to start Blackmagic Design that has redefined the entire broadcast and post production industry. I used their DeckLink hardware for video monitoring and input in my homegrown studio. I was also one of their first customer features on their website in 2004.
When we built the first two Mac-daddy workstations that cost in total far less than the PaintBox or Flint, we equipped them with hardware acceleration PCI boards to speed up rendering in After Effects and Commotion. The company was called ICE, and I was their poster child in a half dozen magazines and a featured artist on their demo reel. I remember the day they sent me a rather pricey gift for my contributions to their marketing campaigns. A huge box arrived early one day with my name on it. I excitedly opened it up revealing my own ICE card and all of the ICE software. My boss had no problem with me taking their gift home to my studio. I even got to travel to New York for a video interview with ICE sharing my secret After Effects weapon for their demo reel. As time went on it became quite clear that eventually all twelve broadcast designers needed access to the same powerful hardware and software gear. Then something happened out of left field. I was invited to have breakfast with the folks at ICE.
I was being actively recruited by the folks at Integrated Computing Engines (ICE) to join their team as a traveling demo artist. I couldn’t resist the opportunity that not only doubled my salary at The Weather Channel, but gave me freedom to continue running my own creative studio. Next I was approached by Digital Voodoo who inquired if I would be interested in being their worldwide support specialist. It was a part time gig for just a few hours a week so I signed on for eighteen months. I helped out primarily for phone support and also assisted at trade shows. I met my future business partner, Chris, at Outpost Pictures when he called the support number one afternoon and I answered. He said it was pretty clear that he knew a bit more than I did. Funny guy. Extremely humble and talented, too.
A few years passed and before I knew it I was consulting for Toolfarm while running my own animation and design home studio. They connected me with numerous vendors and clients including Zax Dow, Mike Skibra, Ted and Shemane Nugent, and the kind folks at RealViz and Adobe. I ended up going on the road with both RealViz once at the University of Seattle, WA, and Adobe numerous times at NAB, Siggraph, and at Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah, Georgia, where I was a student from 1991–1993 for all of my foundation courses. After my showing off my reel and running through the After Effects presentation I met two professors that gave me quite a compliment. They asked if I would like to become a professor at SCAD. I don’t have a Masters degree, but they said no worries, and that I could get it while a was teaching.
I ended up turning down SCAD, but I did make quite a few connections in Atlanta with folks like Sterling Ledet who gave me numerous opportunities to teach After Effects, DVD Studio Pro, and Final Cut Pro to classes ranging from 3–5 and up to a dozen students at a time as was the case for CNN’s creative group. I enjoyed teaching so much that I built out customized training courses for folks at Georgia Pacific Television, the video production team at Philips Arena, New England Sports Network, The Weather Channel, The Weather Channel Latin America, and Ted Nugent’s wife, Shemane.
Adobe’s ecosystem was always at the heart of everything I taught. I was a proud Adobe user and already becoming quite the After Effects evangelist and trainer. However, when Apple bought a video editing program from MacroMedia that became Final Cut Pro, all bets were off with Premiere. How ironic that Adobe bought MacroMedia in 2005, but it was seven years too late. Due to a highly restrained workflow and instabilities we switched to Final Cut Pro 1.2.5 at TWC about a month after we had first implemented those two Blue and White PowerMac G3s I mentioned above. Final Cut Pro was so stable right out of the gate. Premiere, not so much, like ever. Long live Final Cut Pro.
I was honored that Adobe’s Marketing Department reached out to me to fix the Classroom in a Book that Belief had designed. I updated the files and added some newly added AE effects like Scribble to the final look. Adobe used the scene on the back of the AE box that year. I had also just wrapped up Zax Dow’s Zaxwerks identity package including his marketing materials and 3D Invigorator Classic and 3D Invigorator Pro CD installers for After Effects. They were included inside that same AE box with the updated aforementioned CIAB scene. Pretty cool. My work was also featured on the Adobe multimedia demo reel. A year later I found myself alongside three other designers giving demos at the Adobe NAB booth. In 2002 I was a featured artist and an uncredited writer for Studio Secrets: Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I was also involved in creating short examples for an effects gallery, but that project was cancelled.
Thank you Toolfarm, Puffin Designs, EIAS, Zaxwerks, Adobe, ICE, Apple, Red Giant Software, Digital Voodoo, Blackmagic Design, Video Central, Niche Video, Quantel, Discreet Logic, SoftImage, SGI, Ledet, Marshall Graphics Systems, and Film & Video, Millimeter, Video Systems, and Digital Content Creator magazines. More importantly all of the folks behind the scenes I met along the way :) It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to After Effects after twenty-seven years. It was my Swiss-Army knife where I designed, created, and finished all of my broadcast design and compositing work. I am thankful to still have two working copies pre-CC. 5.5 is running on my 1999 Blueberry iMac and the other, version 9, on my mid-2010 27-inch iMac along with all of my favorite plugins. Heck, I still have a working copy of Electric Image, too. I even have my USB dongle, and it still works!
“Work Hard. Render Fast. Retire Young.”
— Electric Image Animation System’s mantra printed in white Futura Ultra on the black box, and the same font I used for my logo five years earlier.