A Short History of my Checkered Past

Growing up in Austin, Texas, I took the city bus five days a week to my job working backstage for a downtown theatre company. Life was pretty easy in those days, working a leisurely nine months out of the year and leaving the summers free. I was twelve years old.

I started working in movies at about fourteen, I was a terrible pest to the Texas Film Commission to get me working in Special Effects and they finally they took pity on me by getting me on as an intern in the Art Departments of any movie that would have me. I continued my theatre career on the professional stage at Zachary Scott theatre doing ten to twelve shows a year and working in all aspects of the production. I was stage managing at fifteen, and finally doing what I had always wanted to do by sixteen - make-up effects. I managed to make it to school most mornings.

Special effects careers were hard won in Central Texas, however, and while I managed to find the only two other people in Texas that did make-up effects - who very generously took me under their wings to teach me what they knew (thanks Paul and Dave) - in order to supplement my income I worked as a spot light operator, stage hand and rigger for the big rock shows on tour through the Frank Erwin center, rigged shows and stadiums all over Texas, and landed numerous jobs with a big video game company doing effects, prop building, and make-up for "Wing Commander 3 and 4", "Crusader 1 and 2", and anything else they could give me along the way. I also worked on local Texas films such as the horror classic "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4" starring two budding stars with challenging names; Renee Zellweger and Matthew Mcconaughey.

In 1995 I got a job in Dallas working on an LA based production, "Space Marines", and was on location there as the make-up and specialty props & armour supervisor. A reporter from the legendary Fangoria Magazine appeared to do a story and hang out for a week, and we became fast friends, catching the late show of "Gamera: Guardian of the Universe" and enjoying it equally. Once that show ended and Anthony went back to LA it turned out that he had been working as a Make-up Effects Supervisor - and he started pitching me little jobs from LA. Thanks to Anthony I built some extending fangs for a Don "The Dragon" Wilson movie, and then he made a heroic pitch to horror movie icon Brian Yuzna to give me a shot on his upcoming film "The Dentist". I flew to LA for an interview, and with Anthony's persistance, Brian took a chance on me. "The Dentist" was one of the hardest things I had ever done and I worked around the clock for eight weeks straight, sleeping on Anthony's couch and stinking up his apartment baking foam latex in his oven at night. During that time I had the knee-shaking fortune to work along side some of the people that I had admired and read about for many years including Kevin Yagher and Christopher Nelson - and I realized that if I were to continue to grow as an artist it was critical to make the move from my Texas home to Los Angeles.

In June of 1996 I finally decided that it was time, and thanks to Shea Clayton, who had been my intern on The Dentist, and his generously offered couch, I moved out to LA with Chris Nelson's recommendation to work at Steve Johnson's XFX on "The Jetsons". The movie fell apart before I got hired, but the town was busy and for the next seven years, starting at the bottom of the pile, I was able to maintain a very decent career in Make-Up Effects working with some amazing talent and on some truly landmark projects including "Steel", "Virus", "The Dentist 2", "Wishmaster 2, 3 and 4", "The Prophesy 2, 3 & 4", "The Crow 3", "Halloween Town 1 & 2" and many other nameless sequels and movies of major historical significance. If there was a horror movie with a 4th sequel, chances are that was me.

Many years and three Fangoria covers later the chemicals and industry pettiness started to wear on me, and with my only real option to advance being starting my own shop in an incredibly competative industry, I decided to start persuing a different kind job in the movie industry: sound design and composing. To be fair, I really wanted to be a composer, but I happened to find a crazy Chinese Director named Tsui Hark, the godfather of Asian action cinema, who liked the music that I played for him off my CD-walkman on a set in Thailand. True to his nature, instead of just the score he gave me the whole sound job for the biggest Chinese action movie ever made at the time, the $20m juggernaut "Black Mask 2: City of Masks". I had never done sound design before in my life, but as always, I said "YES", and just decided I would figured it out. I spent the next 5 months learning Pro-Tools, bought some equipment, hired a small staff, and we made it up as we went along. It wasn't until we got to the mixing stage at Fox Studios in Sydney Australia that my actual sound education began. The lead mixer, Steve Burgess, gave me a gruff and blistering crash course in how I should have been doing it all along - and we finally got through it. It was a crazy, nightmare experience in many ways, but it made me a hell of a sound editor, and I continued to follow that path for several years until a series of extreme disappointments finally shut me down and I decided it was not a job that I wanted, even though I enjoyed it immensely.

It was about this time that I was given a landmark opportunity by my friend Ted Rae to come on to help him on a Mel Gibson pet project, "The Passion of the Christ", on which he had been bestowed the title of Visual Effects Supervisor - and this would set me on a shiny new course in life for which I will be forever grateful. I had always been a follower of visual effects and while I had little experience in that field I did have a good understanding of it - and as the same company that was doing the make-up effects was also doing the visual effects, Ted brought me on as a kind of translator between the two departments. I was part of the very small group of people that determined which effects would be make-up, which would be VFX, and which would be combinations. It was an incredible opportunity, and it finally got me out of the cycle of cheap horror movies and their endless, insipid sequalia. I found an excellent home on that film, helped to design a number of really cool gags, learned a tremendous amount from Ted and countless others who were way smarter than me, and was promoted to VFX Producer for the duration of the show - 18 months as it turned out. And yes, as you are certain to have heard, the hand in the close up of the first nail piercing Jesus' flesh is indeed: my hand.

This began my residency as the in-house MUFX/VFX producer at Captive Audience Productions where I stayed for about three years and worked on a number of interesting projects including "The Exorcism of Emily Rose". Also during this time I decided that I had had enough of working on everyone else's crap and it was time to make my own crap, so with the very generous help of a close group of friends and the support of Captive Audience I produced and directed my first feature film, "Family". It was completed and sold in 2005 after 18 months of very memorable experience, and premiered on Lifetime in January of 2006. It was an overall success, though there is a lot I would do differently next time, and we actually made our money back. Go us.

Like many film professionals I had dreams of producing and directing bigger and bigger projects with the first one as the flagship, but that was not in the cards for our little production company as we all kept getting distracted by small concerns like making a living, and after the sale of "Family" we closed our doors to go on our somewhat seperate ways. Now having had a taste of being more in charge of a film as whole, I found a budding career focusing on visual effects a little hollow and make-up effects was much too far in my past to consider returning to (besides I had absolutely no interest in it anymore), so I decided to try my hand at Post Production Supervising. By the time I delivered "Family" it was basically just down to me, and once we sold it I suddenly found a whole new world of technicality in having to deliver it to my distributor. I was in no way prepared for this, and once I had made it through that nightmarish experience I really wanted to help other indie filmmakers avoid that by informing them of the horrors of delivery. I started advising people making $1m movies, and somewhere along the way I guess someone said I was pretty good at it.

Now in my fifth year of exclusively Post Production Supervising I've been met with fantastic success and continue to he humbled and grateful to grow, learn, and treat every new project as a brand new challenge. The movies have gotten bigger, and the so has the job, and I am ever-grateful to have been so lucky to continue working in a very demanding industry in a critical position. I look forward to the future challenges in both diplomacy and technicality, and every single day I mumble a quiet prayer that no one will find out that I have no idea what I'm doing.