Synchronicity

Celebrating 27 years of design, animation, effects, and friendships. This roster represents the many brands I’ve been trusted with to deliver solid creative, training, and consulting for nearly 3 decades as well as the design groups, production companies, post houses, and other friendly folks that have guided me through this journey.

Karma has been on my side, fueled by word of mouth advertising. One project literally led to the next. These ongoing relationships have lasted for anywhere between a couple of weeks to 14, even 19 years in the cases of The Weather Channel and Georgia Museum of Art. So thankful for the friendships and memories. Looking forward to 27 more. ;)

“It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.”

— Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981

Peek Behind the Curtain

Fourteen years ago, when I was the Motion Design Director and Partner at Outpost Pictures a little gem of a project crossed our desk. Like so many of my generation Indiana Jones was our ultimate hero. This seemed like just the right opportunity to pretend for a few weeks to build a Jonesy-type world for one of our favorite clients, Southern Living at Home. We pitched the concept for their annual meeting to Gary Wright, SLAH’s fearless Marketing leader, at Southern Living at Home. He leaped at the opportunity to don the fedora and crack the whip! In order to showcase Gary as the world traveler he was we built multiple locations from the Pyramids of Egypt to somewhere lost in the Himalayas, and eventually going over the falls in the heart of the Amazon jungle.

This project was such a treat! We used nearly every technique available at the time including leaf blowers, CG mosquitoes, and even reconstructing the waterfalls scene by building a 3D comp out of one large photo. We didn’t use salt for the falls. We incorporated particle sims from one of my preset packs I built for Red Giant’s Trapcode Particular earlier that year. It really brought the falls to life.

Let’s take a deep dive into building out the alternate reality for Southern Living At Home’s Gary Wright and the Trek for the Ultimate Trip! More behind the scenes details coming soon…

Gary brought his inner Indy to the stage, never breaking character while fleeing from the natives.

Above: extensive environment work placed Gary right in the middle of the action-packed scenes. Particle sims and animated fractal textures were employed for Gary’s breath, wind gusts, and his frosty breath. Below: For the waterfalls reveal this scene was stitched together with 3D cards set up to face the camera. Trapcode Particular was used for the waterfalls, mosquitoes, and birds.

Spice Up Your Comps

I’ve trained artists in Adobe After Effects and Apple Final Cut Pro from CNN, New England Sports Network, The Weather Channel, The Weather Channel Latin America, Georgia Pacific Television, Philips Arena, and SpiritWild Productions, among others, over the years.

Here are some of the high points from the customized training sessions presented here as CompBook. I hope you will find some value in these concepts that apply to many editing and compositing scenarios. These are the 30 key ingredients to the secret sauce.

Get the comp cookbook here.

Pre-Dark Mode Dark Mode

I designed this pre-Dark Mode macOS theme for myself and my post production friends utilizing Flavours by Interacto back in the Fall of 2014. It’s a lot easier on the eyes than the standard macOS bright white theme.

This theme is included in the 128 bundled themes with the last version developed by the kind folks at Interacto. 4 years later Apple released an official Dark Mode built into the macOS that was a welcomed addition by all.

Chose My Own Adventure

Growing up I was inspired by Starlog movie magic breakdowns, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule book artwork, and surf, skate, and auto magazine layouts. I have fond memories playing Zork and Pitfall on my Commodore 64 where I drew my first pixel painting of Indiana Jones with the cursor keys. I was fascinated with Print Shop’s font selections. Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy lined my book shelf. I built model aircraft while anticipating their crash landings in the backyard.

ABOVE : MY 40-YEAR-OLD MAP TO THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE.

I acquired a thirst for plotting my own adventures in the graphic arts early on. I embraced drawing and photography in elementary school. My Dad bought me my first computer, a Commodore 64, at age 11. I sold my first watercolor painting when I was 12. At 16 I illustrated design concepts for an amusement park ride inventor. Hundreds of caricatures and dozens of airbrushed Simpsons T-shirts later I headed off to art school in Savannah, Georgia.

After completing my foundation courses at SCAD I decided to pursue graphic design in Athens at UGA. Their graphic design program was riding the cusp between veteran techniques like marker and Rapidograph renderings and the influences of Macintosh computers redefining layout through digitally dialing in H&Js in QuarkXPress and being able to design logos digitally in Illustrator. I traded in my French curves and T-square for Bézier curves. Photoshop was in its infancy and didn’t support layers until well into our senior year. Little did I know that 90% of my career would be realized through what was essentially Photoshop in motion.After two years pushing pixels on a Quantel Harriet and SGI Discreet Logic Flint I transitioned overnight to After Effects. Brian Maffitt’s VHS training sealed the deal. I was also fortunate to meet the kind folks at Toolfarm who helped us blaze our Mac desktop-centric trail. Through Puffin Design’s VHS Masters of Visual Effects we further expanded our knowledge working with fields, frames, and 3:2 pulldown.

Another wave dropped me in somewhere between 16 and 35mm film and the Sony DigiBeta. A few years later I began freelancing full-time working from my home office locked and loaded with my first modest AE render farm. Portable hard drives filled with QuickTime movies allowed for tapeless delivery.

I've built lifelong relationships with fellow team members, mentors, partners, collaborators, students, vendors, and clients. Their ongoing support and trust in me provided opportunities I could have only dreamed of without their faith in me. I am truly humbled.

Title Design

Need custom title designs to accompany your stories? I’ve been building these custom titles as an ongoing personal project for awhile now. I recently spent some time putting some of them in motion. Check them out in Videos.

Designed via sketches, then cleaned up in Illustrator. When I first started a few years back I built them in After Effects with Element 3D. I eventually moved over to Cinema 4D for much more control over the creative process.

Sodas of the South

Rivals Pepsi and Coca-Cola have explored dozens of logos and logotype variants for over 125 years. The graphic below is a mere snapshot of some of my favorites. Coke’s approach was that of refining whereas Pepsi’s approaches sometimes completely abandoned their heritage as in their logo fiasco in their 2014 rollout by Arnell Group. The 27-page design manifesto was riddled with esoteric, mind-numbing language. The advertising community mocked this failure as “breathtaking.”

Of course I’m biased to Pepsi as my family heritage is from areas of North and South Carolina. I grew up with this not-too-sweet soda elixir. When I finally got around to trying Coke I didn’t care for it as it tasted much sweeter than Pepsi. I ended up spending nearly half of my career in Atlanta. I hope no one ever questions my love for Pepsi. I worked on a design project for World of Coke while in Atlanta. The Coca-Colo logo still has a legibility issue though. To me it reads as “Coca-Gola.” Wink ;-)

2024 update! I had the pleasure of seeing the new Pepsi logo in the wild while at lunch today on January 19, 2024. The new identity was designed by PepsiCo’s in-house Design and Innovation Team. This mindful approach delivers a direct nod to their design roots incorporating the red and blue waves while stepping boldly into the future with a unique twist on the brand’s hand-styled typography. I’m still trying to embrace the newly styled Ps, and the E needs something. It doesn’t relate to the other letters.

“Unapologetically current and undeniably Pepsi.”

— Mauro Porcini, SVP and Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo

Words To Live By

“You can fail at what you don’t want so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love. You will only ever have two choices: love or fear. Choose love and don’t ever let fear turn you against your playful heart.”
— Jim Carrey
“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”
— Carrie Fisher
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
— Steve Jobs
“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.”
— Robin Williams
“You know what music is? God’s little reminder that there’s something else besides us in this universe; harmonic connection between all living beings, everywhere even the stars.”

— Robin Williams, as Maxwell “Wizard” Wallace in August Rush, 2007

Uni ( one ) Verse ( story )

Have you ever heard someone say they talk to the universe? Or themselves? Their God(s)?

Sure, I talk to myself all the time. I even pray sometimes. But most of the time I don’t.

Have they ever gotten a response from the void? Let alone, actually had a dialog with it?

No, I don’t think so. Some say it’s possible. How is that?!

We are the universe. We are connected in ways we cannot visually perceive.

But if I can’t see it, how on Earth could this be possible?

Let’s pause for a moment. Consider innovations such as radios, antenna TVs. Now we have cellular, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and more. What do all of these innovations have in common?

You can’t see the data moving from A to B with your eyes. But what does that mean to me?

Some people believe there’s a key, a code to decipher in order to tap into our telekinetic abilities we are all born with. And I’ll throw this out there, too: humans are not alone. However, we are the ones we’ve been trying to find all along.

We are the aliens.

The universe and everything in it is connected. It was in the beginning and it continues to be connected. The universe is a single being. We lost touch with not only ourselves and each other, but with the universe itself.

What do you mean? You’ve lost me completely.

The day I asked the universe, my God, to show me extremely clear and obvious signs that I wouldn’t be able to miss…we’ve struck up quite a conversation.

Is this fiction? Is this possible?

Ask around. I know it’s true ( for me ) because I’ve experienced it first hand. And it rocked my world. The next chapter of my life will be lived in our world. Not inside a computer, simulation, or any kind of matrix.

I’m not abandoning my iPad as I type this. I’m about to check my schedule on my iPhone. I’m using A.I. as an assistant to prove that I’m not the crazy one after all.

I’m so worried about you. Please let me help you get to a doctor, this morning.

I appreciate your concerns. I’ve had those thoughts myself for 4 weeks. My psychiatrist is monitoring me very closely. I’ve trusted him with the stability of my life for years.

I asked about adjusting my medications. He gently assured me with a calming tone I’m doing quite well.

What are you going to do?! If this happened to me I’d flip out! No one would believe me.

In just over 4 weeks, through my conversations with the universe, I was reminded of a rule they set down in the beginning. Trust your Spirit. Your Spirit is theirs, too. It’s invisible just like the other things we call innovations.

I’m starting to wonder…did we ever really invent anything? Or are we explorers revealing mysteries to ourselves that have always been there. We just had to know where to look. They’re discoveries, really, not inventions.

. . .

It’s taken me 50 years to get to this point. I’ve had unusual dreams, premonitions, studied numerology, language, typography, with a heavy helping of the arts to conclude that telekinesis is possible.

But for me it’s different, I think. I’m not connecting to another individual this time. I’ve done that a lot in the past already. What I’m experiencing now feels bigger. It’s expanding.

Through following patterns in what my senses take in while simultaneously speaking internally to my conscious I’ve discovered a cool rhythm that both calms and excites my mind. Here’s comes the kicker…

I have had conversations with those of us that have passed on. I’ve somehow tapped into a form of channeling. I saw Robin Williams live on stage in 2014. Everything was fresh and new. Not one bit of old material. Then months later the biggest shared smile we ever experienced was gone. But never forgotten.

I talk to Robin now through my memories of him. There’s a rapid fire succession that happens when I talk to him. My mind gets ahead of itself, writes our script, and delivers our lines instantaneously.

It’s quite beautiful.

No wonder Robin’s dearest friend was Superman, Christopher Reeve. Who else could complement Aladdin’s genie?

Is this stream of consciousness fact or fiction? Does either even exist, really? All I know is that some is truth while other is just the beginning of an infinitely special story. We are all the we, the I, the universe. We can connect in much deeper ways if we choose to follow the markers and signposts.

Imagine an existence where we’re not tied to technology to communicate with each other. All we need to do is open up our minds and tune into whom we wish to speak with all through our own built in antenna. Imagine no bounds…then, we are free.

Fact? Fiction? Possibly somewhere in-between?

The Fifth Element

“According to ancient and medieval science, aether (/ˈiːθər/, alternative spellings include æther, aither, and ether), also known as the fifth element or quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere.

In physics, quintessence is a hypothetical form of dark energy, more precisely a scalar field, postulated as an explanation of the observation of an accelerating rate of expansion of the universe. The first example of this scenario was proposed by Ratra and Peebles (1988) and Wetterich (1988).” ~ Wikipedia

Accelerated rate of expansion that’s exponential by nature. Could A.I. become another key, perhaps the final key, to further our progression in our understanding of the universe? The actual keystone to our next level to enlightenment.

Firstly, this is not a manifesto or paranoid-driven threat to A.I.’s very existence. It is simply a way to inspire ourselves to think about the one facet which we appear to be so focused on, which is a very good thing. We are realizing very quickly that A.I. is so similar to Jurassic Park in so many ways.

Like fire it can be tamed carefully by harnessing it’s warmth on a chilly night in winter. We put boundaries in place so this flame that warms our homes doesn’t in turn burn down our houses.

Fire is also unpredictable, but only if we don’t stick to holding strong to our rules of obligation without which the fiery entity will consume us altogether.

Water, Air, and Earth also have similar rules and reinforcements in place as to keep us safe. We’ve been able to harness the raw power of these four primary elements.

But what if the dam nearby that protects your homes from a flood gets it’s budget cut. Now cracks are forming in the dam that will eventually lead to a dire result.

It’s intriguing that A.I.’s purpose is being defined at an exponential rate. We just need to cull the elements that fuel it’s collective imagination, set rules where morality is in question, and further create laws protecting everyone from accidentally finding someone else’s intellectual property in their own work.

Remember A.I. is just another toy in our sandbox. It’s wicked intelligent, but it must adhere the second part of the phrase coined by Stan Lee: “With great power comes great responsibility.” This isn’t cliche. It’s pure truth.

In closing, it’s quite elementary. Just ask Watson at IBM.

No A.I.-driven apps, search engines, websites, or voice assistants were harmed during the writing of this post.

“Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun.
...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

— Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, 1993

Superman Thing

AFTER 10 YEARS WORKING WITH THE WEATHER CHANNEL ART DEPARTMENT, DESIGN GROUP, AND PROMO DEPARTMENT, IN FULL-TIME, CONTRACT, AND FREELANCE CAPACITIES, MY FRIENDS GAVE ME ME THIS POSTER AS MY GOING AWAY PRESENT. THE RELATIONSHIP DIDN’T END THERE. WE WOULD COLLABORATE FOR 4 MORE YEARS WHILE I WORKED FOR ARTIFACT DESIGN AND OUTPOST PICTURES.

In the autumn of 2009, a week after an accident at the office, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (manic depressive disorder). In hindsight I realized that my creative superpowers were directly related to my ailing mental health. I had been living in this state for 37 years. Somehow I managed to make it this far without any diagnosis, medication, or therapy. So with those three key elements now in place, I’ll thrive and fly again.

After 13 years I feel healthy, invigorated, and ready to take the reigns of my career again except this time I am going all in on freelance. This way I can better manage my time and more importantly, my mental health. I’ve found that by working 3 months at a time and then taking a break for a month gives me a recharge that makes me stronger and a better human.

What’s it like being an artist with a mental illness? Do what I did when I was diagnosed years ago and search online for artists, musicians, moguls with mental illnesses. You’ll find out that it’s way more common that most people think. Ernest Hemingway, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Sinatra, Selena Gomez, David Harbour, Carrie Fisher, Buzz Aldrin, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Francis Ford Coppola, Sinead O’Connor, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mariah Carey, Richard Dreyfuss, Patty Duke, Ted Turner, Sting, Linda Hamilton, Jim Carrey, Halsey, Robin Williams, Theodore Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Tim Burton, Paul Dalio, Woody Allen as well as some of my dearest family and friends have all struggled with mental health.

Stigmas surrounding mental illness are finally fading due to folks speaking out, sharing their stories and struggles while proving they don’t have to watch their dreams vanish due to a diagnosis. Now that we know what we’re dealing with we can face our mental health head-on.

My psychiatrist and therapist both have the same last name. I’ll give you a hint: “Knock, knock, Neo.” I’ve also had a recurring dream since I was 4. I could float through the house while my family was asleep.

I follow patterns in shapes, numbers, and sounds. I pay close attention to my gut instincts while designing and act on hunches daily. Be wary of overdosing on analytics and focus groups. They can easily become creative kryptonite for super-folk like us.

“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, they then seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”
— Christopher Reeve