Getting Bandito Started

I started doing more work for the newly formed company, and kept track of my time, but wasn’t getting paid, because there was no mechanism in place to do that.  They still hadn’t set up business accounts, or a payroll service and such, since I was the only regular employee.  One day I was told that one of the “owners” didn’t like that I wore shorts to work, so I was supposed to wear pants from then on.  I pointed out that I didn’t really work for them until they started actually paying me.  I got my first paycheck the next week, and it has been jeans and a T-Shirt every day since then.  Kind of like my version of Zuckerberg’s hoodie.

I got an interesting project opportunity that November, to work with Rob Legato at his company the Basement.  I spent four long days working on a real feature film, The Good Shepherd.  They were in a serious time bind to get a lot of shots processed, and I was able to borrow a workstation we had on loan from Intel at our office, which was twice as fast as anything else on the market.  So I was able to do an incredible amount of image processing for them in such a short period of time, and I got paid well for the experience.  I just missed meeting Robert DeNiro because I was on a delivery run when he came by to review what we were working on.  But I met quite a few other people who were working on the project, got a lot of work done, and did a few legitimate visual effects shots for the movie.

I also worked for Adobe as a demo artist at the LA Film festival.  It was my first time trying to advertise or sell something, and definitely had its ups and downs.  I worked every night of the festival, and sometimes it was awkward conversations with random people walking up to our display, and other times I had a whole crowd watching as I demonstrated some intriguing new technique using the software most of them were familiar with.

Shortly after that, Bandito finally rented their first office building, and I set to work preparing it to be an edit facility.  I ordered desks and cabinets, ran all of the network wiring myself, and setup a wireless phone system that ran over the internet.  I setup a rudimentary server room as well as a screening room to show our work.  I had always wanted to build the infrastructure for a technology company from the ground up, and this was my chance to do so.  I had originally anticipated doing that for a game development company, but looking back, that wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting or challenging as building a video production facility.  By the time I returned from Christmas, the company was in full swing, preparing for our first big project, a series of tire commercials for BFGoodrich.  That project went well, and got us off to a good start.

I bounced between our new office and the work I was doing for the guys at our old office, since things at Bandito were still pretty light.  The guys at the old office gave me a nice raise to try to keep me around, but the work there was not nearly as interesting or exciting.  I was creating websites at Bandito, to allow our clients to review progress on their projects as we worked, and setup an expensive color correction system for film finishing.  We did a variety of car commercials and other smaller projects over the first few months there.

Leaving College and Entering Real Life

It was only a few weeks later that we had finals and graduation.  I had my last final on Tuesday, and had the rest of the week to hang out with my friends before we headed off to different parts of the world.  I spent that night hanging out with a few friends until late.  Some girl I had never even met ended up hanging out with us, and I stayed up most of the night talking to her.  She gave me her number, and I assured her that unlike other guys she had met in the past, I actually would give her a call.

The next morning when I woke up, I was severely ill.  Something was wrong with my throat, to the degree that I couldn't speak, couldn't eat, and could barely swallow.  I spent the rest of that week in bed, semi-conscious day and night, just trying to get through it.  Ice cream was about the only thing I could eat, because it went down smoothly and was cold to numb the pain a bit.  Needless to say, that girl didn't get a callback, since my voice was totally gone.  She did eventually find me on Facebook, where my whole getting "sick" story sounded kind of weak after all we had talked about, regardless of how true it was.  And while we did end up going to a movie together a few months later, that never went anywhere.

My parents arrived the day before graduation, but there wasn't much they could do to help me, considering how sick I was.  I attended the ceremony, walked across the stage, and got my picture taken, but then went from there to the hospital, because it had gotten to the point of having issues breathing.  But they weren't much help there, so I toughed it out for another day or two, while moving out, loading up my Dad's truck, and heading north.  We did manage to start the process of arranging an apartment for me to rent in LA, but they weren't ready for me to move in, and neither was I.

I spent a week recovering at home before we headed to Maui, to celebrate my graduation from college, and my brother's graduation from high school.  After listening to an exciting presentation about the wonderful benefits of timeshares, my parents were able to get really good deals on tickets to all of the main attractions.  So we spent the week sailing, jet-skiing, cycling down a volcano, parasailing, snorkeling, and even took a voyage on a submarine.  It was a pretty intense week, so we needed a break by the time we were done.  I spent the next week at home, finalizing preparations for my move to LA, and getting my wisdom teeth removed.  That is the only time I have had general anesthesia, but besides feeling a little strange for the rest of the day, that was a fairly uneventful procedure.

After that, I headed back to LA, and moved into my new apartment, with the help of my Mom and brother.  I started back to work immediately, with a shorter commute, which was still an hour if traffic was bad, but only 20 minutes at midnight.  My boss took a month long trip to Italy shortly after that, so I covered all of his responsibilities while he was gone.  And I was getting paid at this point, so that was nice.  I also started doing more serious work for the other company in the building, which I would continue to do until after the new company we were starting, Bandito, was well off the ground.

NAB Adventure Redux

After my first adventure in Vegas, I skipped the event entirely my Junior year, but I returned to attend the NAB convention in Vegas again my Senior year.  I went with two other guys, and just rented a cheap room in Vegas, that looked like it was close to the Strip.  That was deceptive, as it was not easy to get to the strip from there, and while I had reserve a room at the Travelodge, the building at that address was called the Vagabond Inn.  It lived up to its name, and was full of the kinds on interesting characters that you will only find in the slummy part of Vegas, a short distance off the strip.  The guys I was with didn't want to waste money on a cab, so we decided to walk to the strip to look around that evening.  It looked close, and was probably less than a mile away, but there was no direct route to get there.  There were fences to jump and railroads to cross, and we had all sorts of interesting adventures.  I am pretty sure we had to step over a sleeping homeless guy to get through one spot, and across the back of a strip club once we were closer to "civilization."  We eventually made it to the strip itself, and spend most of the night looking around.  We didn't want to take the same route back, so we ended up on narrow overpasses and running across freeway off-ramps to get back to the hotel.

I think we took a car to the convention the next morning, and the event itself was relatively mundane.  It had been arranged that I was supposed to interview someone for my professor, for an article he was working on.  But when I found the guy, he wouldn't give me the time of day, which was a very strange experience.  I had met him before, and I ended up working with him a couple years later, but that must have been a heck of an off day for him.  We survived the rest of our time in Vegas, and I even made enough gambling with their money, to pay for our meals.

I was beginning to get to know a lot more of the people in the industry by that point, and had been working on a variety of random projects with people I had been introduced to through my internship.  I did a day or two of work in a number of different facilities, on a wide variety of tasks.  It never ceased to amaze me how much people in the industry didn’t know about the technology they were using, or in many cases, just attempting to use.  I had the benefit of not being held back by the mindset of the old way of doing things, and had done all of my video work on computers from the beginning.  This perspective continues to serve me well to this day, in developing new ways to use existing technology that other people don’t see as easily.

I did a lot of work with Adobe software, and once I was invited into their beta development program, started connecting with their engineers more.  Much of the work being done in our office was for them, and did much of that myself while my boss was distracted by some outside personal issues that year.  I ended up commuting down into Hollywood at least three days a week, while doing a full schedule of classes back at school, so I kept pretty busy.

Compositing Legos in 3D

My other project was far more ambitious, in that I combined a number of challenges.  I had wanted to make a Lego movie, a green screen compositing based movie, an animated movie, and a stereoscopic 3D movie, so I decided to do them all in one project.  So I shot Lego sets in 3D, and then composited in real people and digitally animated Lego characters.  It was called My Roommate's Kingdom, and it was about a guy who wakes up the size of a Lego character, and how he interacts with that world, as well as the full-sized world the Legos inhabit.  It was a tremendously complicated project to undertake, especially with the tools I had available.

We shot the entire thing at the end of Christmas break, and then I spent the next two months editing and finishing it for a film festival.  A lot of other people contributed to the process, but I definitely did a majority of the work myself.  Those were probably the most disciplined months of my life, getting up at 6am every day, running around the school to stay in shape/wake up, and then editing every spare moment until going to sleep around midnight.  It was the most organized project I had ever worked on, with every file named perfectly down to the last day to keep every layer and version straight.  I submitted the finished piece at the beginning of March, and that was the last day I went running in the morning.

I also got roped into giving a sermon at a midweek evening service at church the next day, so I had to compose that as well.  I ended up speaking on priorities, in regards to how one chooses to spend the time between now and when they die.  It was very relevant to the deliberate way I had spent the last two months, but I don't remember all the details since it was a while ago and I was pretty tired by that point.

One morning that spring I was working on a project with some friends in my room, when I got call from my Mom.  She was obviously crying, which is never a good start.  She likes to break bad news to people slowly, which I don't like, because I have a pretty powerful imagination.  My first guess was that my grandmother must have died, as my last remaining grandparent.  When it became apparent that that wasn't the case, my next guess was something had happened to my Dad.  When it was finally revealed that Flash, our German Shepherd, had died that morning, that was a relief in a sense.  I hardly cared by comparison to the other possibilities.  So I guess her approach was effective in a way, but still not worth the stressful moment in between.  Flash had been "my" dog originally, but had basically become my Dad's once I moved away.  She was only seven, but in a way had never really grown up.  She was an outdoor dog that was absolutely convinced she was supposed to be an indoor dog, so she never gave up on barking and scratching at the door to be let in.  I guess blind persistence is a trait that runs strong through ALL aspects of my family.

The project I had been working on was preparation for the ACM programming competition.  There were three of us on the team, and only one computer science major.  And we didn't all know the same programming language.  We ended up competing against the best programmers from schools like CalTech and Harvey Mudd, and while we were in no danger of winning, we faired pretty well all things considered.

Getting Started in Hollywood

After surviving my internship over the summer, as a multimedia major, I was still required to do one more before graduating.  My professor had written an article about an unusual movie that had been created using tools that I was familiar with, so he connected me with the people involved with that project.  I went down into Hollywood for a lunch interview with Jacob, who had been the post-production supervisor, and spent the rest of the day working on actual productive work with him.  He had an office at another facility, but a group of guys from the project were planning to start a permanent company based on the approach they took with the movie.  He also was currently doing a lot of work with Adobe, a company I was familiar with, since that had been the company giving us the grant for the new editing lab I built at college.

I had setup my class schedule to have three days a week available, so I was able to spend quite a bit of time working in Hollywood.  I didn't get paid yet, but they provided gas money and a cell phone.  My previous cell phone hadn't survived the Batman ride, at Magic Mountain that summer.  By the end of the school year I had enough hours accumulated to easily cover both internships I had needed, (meaning I could have skipped the first one) and a whole lot of new experience.

That environment was a much better fit for my skill set and experience, and I got quite involved with what was going on.  There wasn't really a "company" yet, and I was basically working with Jacob, but I met other people he worked with and connected with them as well.  He was being provided an office at another company, specializing in encoding for all of the major studios, so I got to know them as well, and was soon working for them separately.

I had purchase a very powerful computer over the summer, which became very useful for projects both for class and for work.  This allowed me to take work home with me, for days when I had class, and wouldn't make the commute down into Hollywood.

Back at school I had two major video projects I was working on.  The first was my honors project for multimedia, which was a sequel to Getting Lucky, now that people finally understood the intricacies of the original complicated script.  But by the time it got rewritten by outside editors, it was once again a totally different movie, which came to be called Queen of Hearts.  This time I directed, while someone else was supposed to take responsibility for producing it.  My agreement was that I was responsible for shooting it, but not for editing or finishing it.  This was because the last year's projects hadn't even gotten to that stage yet, based on the way the department was run.  And I had no intention of being tied to this project forever, like a boat anchor.  The end result wasn't as good as I hoped, because I am a much better producer than director, and a much better producer than any of the other students available.  They used my footage as the source for the editing class for many years, and I recently heard that they shot new scenes with some of the same actors, years later.  That made my footage a flashback from the past, with younger versions of the same actors, but I haven’t seen the results of any of that work.

Big Changes Senior Year

We had a brand new residence hall building my senior year, with each resident getting their own bedroom, albeit a very small one.  I managed to get an ideal corner room, with a good view of my side of campus.  That layout isn't very conducive to community, and my roommates were all CS majors, so that only compounded the problem.  They kept strange hours, and I would occasionally come into the kitchen at 3am to get a drink of water, and find them in the middle of making a multicourse meal.  But we did have a full kitchen, so I didn't get a meal plan that year, and instead cooked all my own food.  Not eating at the cafeteria further decreased my social interaction and involvement in the community, but the increased quality of the food I was eating was probably worth it.

J only lived a block away from campus, so she was basically over every night for dinner.  Shortly into the semester, we had a few long talks about our relationship.  She was nine months out of college, in her eighth relationship, and ready to get married.  I was in college, on my first relationship, and not ready to get married.  I recognized that I had a lot to learn still, and knew that our relationship wasn't ideal, but had no real basis from which to evaluate it.  She correctly deduced that I really needed to experience closer relationships with other people before I would be confident enough to get married.  So we "broke up," for real this time, but on good terms, so we were still quite close.  I had a few people to talk to about it, which helped a lot, and it happened gradually over a period of time, so that made it easier.  She still came over every night for dinner for the next few months, since she still didn't really know how to cook, but the romantic aspect of our relationship ended abruptly and completely.  Eventually after Christmas, we had grown apart to the point that we no longer saw each other, and that was that.  We connected back up when I graduated, to trade back some items we still had from each other, like a bike and a microwave, but we were never really close again.  She ended up moving to Washington a few years ago and then got married last summer.

After three years of successful Bible studies, I tried to start another one my senior year, for a repeat performance.  Basically it was a complete failure, in that no one ever really came.  I went out to the lounge once a week for about a month, and read the Bible by myself, until I gave up on anyone else showing up.  Ironically the front desk worker who observed all this became friends with me later, and told me how she had always been impressed that I came out every week and read my Bible in the lounge, having no idea that I saw those evenings as failures, being frustrated every time when no one showed up.

An amusing incident happened early in the year, when I agreed to help teach the Computer Science Departmental Assistants how to maintain their computer lab.  This would alleviate the task from the school IT Dept, where I worked.  I was told by the head professor of the dept that the only time that worked with everyone’s schedule was super early in the morning, so I reluctantly agreed.  I arrived early that morning, and the professor was there to unlock the lab, but no assistants showed up.  When I asked him the names of his assistants, I discovered that all three of them were my roommates.  I had never seen any of them get up before noon, so I could have told him they would be a no-show back when we scheduled it.  Instead of getting up and heading across campus super early in the morning, I could have just told them what they needed to do while we were relaxing in our dorm room the night before, or any other time for that matter.  Needless to say, they didn’t show up, and we all had a nice laugh about it later.

A Long Last Summer of College

If I was omniscient, I would have known to quit my internship right then during finals week, while I was ahead of the game after three good days of shooting.  But I had no idea of that at the time.  Once the semester ended, I started working in their office.  I was assigned to shadow Bill, their director of operations, which usually entailed sitting in his office listening to him make phone calls.  During the exciting moments, I would walk across the hall to retrieve a printout from the copy machine.  Occasionally during the receptionist's lunch hour, I would answer the phones, which was the most stressful task ever.  “So I am just supposed to wait here until this phone rings at random, and then pick it up, to talk with a complete stranger, who isn't looking for me, and whose questions I can't answer?  Awesome.”  I figure I had a fifty-fifty chance of hanging up on someone instead of transferring their call, because of how unintuitive their phone system was, and no one was around during lunch anyway.  Since I never had the answers to their questions, I have no idea why we didn't just let all of the calls go to voice mail during lunch.

On some days I would get sent downstairs to the machine room, which was much more interesting, but I usually just observed what was going on.  I would frequently be able to assist with issues or head off problems based on what I would learn from sitting in Bill's office upstairs for so long.  But for the most part I actually did very little.  Besides one other random afternoon shoot, I never did anything exciting, or went anywhere for the rest of the summer that I worked there.  Luckily I was alternating between working there and back at the tech department at the college, where I was still the student supervisor, so that was the opposite work environment.

I was living on campus again that summer, and this time with two of my closest friends.  It is the only time I have ever really been close with my roommates, and we had long talks every night.  The topics were usually the same, centering on girls and relationships.  We came from opposite perspectives, with one of my roommates Ben, who we called the "chick magnet," because he was beating off girls with a stick.  The funniest part was that he was clueless to the fact that this was not “normal” since it was all he had ever experienced.  He didn't get much sympathy from my other roommate, who had pursued girls fairly aggressively, without ever getting any positive results, ever.  I was sort of in the middle, in that I had a girlfriend, but had never had any positive progress with girls outside of that specific relationship, which wasn’t even at my own initiative.

Another significant event that took place at the beginning of that summer was that my grandmother passed away.  She hadn't been able to recognize me since her stroke five years before, and she had been paranoid schizophrenic for the ten years prior to that, so we weren't particularly "close" by any stretch of the imagination.  But it was still an ordeal for the family to get through.

Once I got back to Southern California, I spent the rest of the summer bouncing between my internship and my job on campus.  I did admittedly learn a few things from my internship, but to say that my talents were underutilized would be a serious understatement.  I didn't actually get much accomplished while I worked there, which was not an issue I had ever really experienced in the past.   Fortunately, my next internship did not suffer from the same problem.

Doing Lots of Video Work

I wrote another script later that year, for a much shorter 15-minute narrative film, called Getting Lucky.  It may be one of the most complicated stories of its length ever, since I am a fairly concise writer.  It involved a group of individuals betting on relationships, and how those external motivations affected the progression of those relationships.  It was one of the scripts selected to be produced by the HD Video class.  After mapping out all of the plot points and story elements on whiteboards for hours, to prove that the underlying story DID make sense, I eventually conceded to simplify it considerably anyway, before we started shooting it.  I produced the film, but chose other people to direct and DP it.  I kind of wish we had filmed the elements for the more complicated version, for a "producer's cut," but that is just life.  We were nearly the only ones who actually finished our project before the end of the year.  Three of the five projects that were undertaken that semester took years to complete.

J had been on track to graduate early, so she finished at the end of the fall semester, and moved across town.  That obviously changed our relationship, since she wasn't right there all the time, but we survived, and saw each other to or three times a week.  I helped her get setup in the room she was renting, and taught her how to cook a few things, since she had little experience with that.  She had trouble finding work, but eventually ended up with positions at a pet store and a vet clinic, which were suitable since she liked animals.  She moved back to an apartment right near the campus by that summer, which made things simpler.

As the spring semester came to a close, I started to look for another internship, since I needed to do two to graduate, and the previous one had fallen through.  I interviewed at a relatively small production company that had pioneered HD video, which ended up being quite the experience.  The owner had an interesting attitude about things, and basically threw me out of the interview because I wasn't familiar with his work.  He told me to come back in a week, after I knew how important the guy I wanted to work with was.  There wasn't much to learn, but I didn't tell him that.  At the second interview, which was the Thursday before finals, he asked me: "what are you doing tomorrow?"  Luckily finals never really intimidated me, and I rarely had anything to catch-up on, so I was free.  He was filming an arena football game in San Jose, and wanted to bring me along.  The catch was, that was an eight hour drive each way, so I caught a ride in the gear truck at 5am, and started a very long day. 

We arrived in the early afternoon, and picked up my new boss from the airport, before heading to the stadium.  We unloaded the truck, which had a bunch of Sony's newest HD Broadcast gear, most of which I had never seen, let alone used.  After setting up most of the gear high up in a private box, I was setup to assist the other cameraman, providing him with fresh batteries and tapes, as well as carrying the 30lbs camera between shooting positions on the field.  We moved from one side of the stadium to the other every time the ball changed sides, running through the back corridors to get to the opposite side.  I was a lot faster than the older cameraman, and in good shape, so I usually beat him by about thirty seconds, which allowed me to capture a few shots that we would have missed by the time he arrived.  It was quite a day, and we packed up to head home before midnight.  We didn't get back to my car until after sunrise.  By the time I got home, it had been a 25 hour day, my first day on the job.  The next two days I worked were shoots on Venice beach, during finals week.  We filmed kite surfers, street performers, and a wide variety of other things.  I spent most of the time carrying around a tripod and taking care of batteries, but it was a good experience.

Meanwhile Back When I was in College

So it is time to resume the story again, as dictated by having a long flight, with time for me to write an extensive section.  I left off a few months ago, at the point where I was about to start my junior year of college, after having recently formalized my relationship with my girlfriend J.

I moved into a new dorm room at the beginning of the semester, with four other roommates, three of whom I already knew.  It was a bit crowded, but overall a MUCH better living situation than the one I had survived the previous year.  My roommates were all big sports fans, so they were always watching some game on TV ever night.  I ended up watching the Red Sox come back from being 0-3 against the Yankees to win the World Series that fall, which is the most baseball I have watched in my life.  Some of my best friends lived across the hall, and J lived 50 yards away, so things were as good socially as they had ever been for me.

Somehow I ended up being on the church council again, for the on-campus congregation.  They made me the vice-president/treasurer that year, primarily because no one else wanted the job.  So I met with the president of the council and the pastors every week, to plan for the weekly meetings and other events.  I was also responsible for counting the offering after service, which usually didn't take long, at the rate college students usually give.  I also ended up leading a weekly Bible study with a different co-leader, which once again was the only one in the congregation to last the full duration of the school year.  This led me to the logical conclusion that I was a pretty good Bible study leader, a hypothesis that was later strained under test.

A number of my classes that semester involved web design, so I managed to get credit for certain projects from multiple teachers.  I was also in a new multimedia class HD Video, which was cutting edge technology at the time.  It was designed to utilize the new editing rooms I had built that summer, and was fairly broad in its scope.  Our first assignment was to write a 120 page screenplay in the first three weeks.  I completed that, but the quality of my work declined as time went on, as is to be expected with any endurance writing endeavor.  I am not a fan of the approach of forcing oneself to generate tons of content in the hope that some of it turns out good.  I am more deliberate than that, and prefer to only write when I have something worth committing to paper.  Once that was done we focused more on the technology aspect, and prepared to do more practical projects.

Now that I had a car for getting up North and back, I had the flexibility to stop and see my grandparents who lived along Highway 99.  So I would stop to visit at their retirement community every trip, either on the way there or back, depending on the timing of my journey.  That January, shortly after I got back from Christmas break, I received word that my other grandfather had passed away.  Considering that he was practically blind and deaf, with diabetes and a previous heart attack, this wasn't as shocking as it could have been.  I was glad that I had just seen him the previous week, on my trip back from Christmas at home.  The funeral was across the street from their retirement home, and everyone from my dad’s side of the family showed up.  I had taken advantage of many opportunities the previous year to videotape my grandparents at family gatherings and such, to capture many of the stories they told and such.  So it is good to still have those DVDs to remember them by.