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!
