Starting On Construction

The new office facility was my first experience with a major construction project.  Most of the work was done by the same crew that built our film sets, which doesn’t lead to a lasting quality product.  I designed all of the circuits and wiring, and oversaw the construction over about six weeks.  The week before we were scheduled to move in, we arrived to find that the utility company had removed both of the main electrical services into the building, leaving us without a source of power.  We were told by the landlord that this was an expected part of the process, and that they needed to be replaced.  That slowed progress down, but our guys just ran extension cords from the next building to power their tools.  It was eventually discovered that the replacement process was expected to take the power company six months.  Obviously that was the wrong answer, since we were moving in a video editing facility in a week and needed electricity.  We eventually got them to install a temporary power service hookup, usually used on construction sites, which we ended up using for two years.  It was much less power than we really needed, but we tried to make do.

There was also no phone service or internet wiring going to the building.  The landlord solved this by running a regular wire across the roofs of three other building, and plugging it into the phone service at their maintenance office.  So we moved in a production company with four phone lines and a DSL connection.  We discovered the week we moved in that the plumbing in the bathrooms needed to be replaced, which involved a lot of jack-hammering and bad smells for our first week of work there.

It was at this point that the facility got the nickname the FOB, or Forward Operating Base.  We did enough work with the military, and with the army tents setup in rows, that someone pointed out we were roughing it a lot like the temporary military emplacements in foreign countries.

There was a large beam that ran right through the center of the upper floor area, about four feet off the floor, which was the source of more than one headache.  But it also was able to form the physical backbone of the network, with wires from the server rack headed through the rafters to places all over the building.  Since we were directly above the edit rooms, I placed the workstation towers on the second floor, and ran wires from them down to the monitors and peripherals in the edit rooms.  That made for a quieter environment in the edit rooms, and gave me access to work on the systems easily.  It also allowed me to route different systems into different rooms, depending on the needs of the projects we were working on.

I also built us a theater, with a workstation desk console in the back, in what I consider to be the ideal way to edit.  We contracted an outside company to install the phone system and network wiring that I designed, but I ran the fiber optic lines, as well as the audio and video cables on my own.  I had a large desk custom built upstairs for myself, and had systems setup on three sides of me, and well as a separate work area to build and repair equipment.  Workspace wise, it was the most ideal layout I have ever setup.  It is amazing what you can do with a surplus of space, and the freedom to use it.

I Work Here

When I returned to Bandito, I showed up to the office on a Monday morning, about 10am.  I parked in back, and walked past a girl dumping a wastebasket in the dumpster.  I went inside and headed back to my office.  The place looked familiar, but I didn’t recognize the two or three people I saw, busy on their laptops.  I looking into to my office, which was unoccupied, and my equipment was still there.  I checked the other hallway, and saw another unfamiliar face before being intercepted by the girl from outside.  “Um, excuse me.  Can I help you with something?”  “Yeah, I am Mike McCarthy.  I work here.”  Her response was priceless, and I still tease her about it: “Oh!  I thought you’d be so much older!”  That was followed by a wide-eyed expression and hand over her open mouth as she caught herself.  After an awkward moment I responded with “well, this is me,” and she introduced herself as Hana, our new receptionist.

I headed back to my office, and shortly thereafter the interns who had been covering my position that summer finally arrived and we began to catch up on what I had missed.  They had hired a few people while I was gone, gotten rid of a couple more, and everyone I knew was just late coming in after a long weekend.  We had a couple day overlap while I was brought up to speed on our current projects, before they headed back to school for the next year.

The cast didn’t end up being too big of an issue at work, since I am quite good at typing with one hand.  I got it off six weeks later, and did a few months of physical therapy, but was able to get full movement back in my hand, which was not a foregone conclusion when they had shortened the tendon a bit to overlap the join.

My roommate Shaun knew my boss, having previously lived with him, so that spring he had also began doing odd jobs around the office and when we went on location, to supplement his lack of income as a "writer."  Around the time I got back from camp that year, he was hired on at Bandito as well, initially to help with our move to a new facility.

The big news at the time was that we were finally moving to a much larger facility, down in Culver City.  We had gotten a long term lease on a building that was under construction, but we had to move out of our current location immediately, because it was going to be torn down.  That is how bad our first office building was.  So in the meantime, we were going to move into a warehouse nearby, as a temporary location for “about six months.”  We would have to setup everything in there, and work there while our permanent building was constructed fifty yards away.

I started going down frequently to plan and design our new location.  It was a huge open warehouse, with a large raised platform in one corner.  We built walls around the base of that to make solid edit rooms for acoustic reasons.  The rest of the offices were setup in army tents on the open floor.  The area on top of the platform was for my desk and my boss’s, the server racks, and all of the other post support functions.  It was about a thousand square feet up there, so we had far more space than our entire previous location.   We eventually had three other workstation areas setup up there, for our interns and assistant editors.

Before Heading Back to LA

The last day of camp that summer, I felt a strong need to have a direct talk with P, about our relationship, and what she was looking for.  I really liked her, and we had been having great conversations together all summer, but we never ventured anywhere close to discussing the relationship we had with each other.  It was the first time in my life that my head and my heart were in agreement on that topic.  In the past, I had been very attracted to girls who I knew probably weren’t the best match, and I knew girls had were very compatible on paper, but I just didn’t feel much emotional connection towards them.  It had always been a process of weighing the heart against the head, which usually prevented me from really doing much in any case.  So having both of those perspectives leading me in the same direction, was a totally new experience for me, which I didn’t really know how to handle.

 

I never used to discuss those types of things with other people either, but Kenny had been both my prayer partner and PPAIN group leader that summer, and he was moving to Virginia the next week.  It seemed pretty clear that I was never going to see him again, making him an ideal person to discuss it all with.  We spent that last afternoon together, cleaning up the paintball gear for the season, but I couldn’t bring myself to initiate a talk on that subject until we were walking back up the hill.  I usually start those conversations fairly vaguely, to see if the other person has noticed any of the same things, which would validate my somewhat more biased observations.  Eventually he directly asked me. “Just spit it out, who is it?”  When I told him, he encouraged me to make sure I had a direct conversation with her before I left. “You just got to do it man.”

 

With those words of wisdom, I headed off to the last horse show.  Ironically I had a similar conversation with H during and after the show.  Taking a similar vague approach led her to the conclusion I was indirectly talking about her.  I could see that was the direction her assumptions were going, but it was still difficult for me to reveal the identity of the person in question.  I had never really shared my feelings with others in any way, so it was a challenge no matter how I went about it, even just telling other people.  She was relieved to discover that my relationship with her was still solidly in the “friend” camp, and encouraged me to have that talk with P as well.  My only reasons to hesitate were that I had never really done something like that, and I was basing my feelings and perspective on pretty vague signals about how P felt.  I was pretty emotionally spent after the conversation with H, and the show was long over by the time we finished talking.

 

As I walked over the hill away from the arena, everyone was just finishing cleaning up, and getting into their vehicles.  I was offered a ride, and ended up in the car with P and her friend, who we dropped off at staff parking.  So this was that opportunity I had been waiting for, I couldn’t have asked for a more straightforward chance to have a direct talk, but it still took me a few minutes to move things that direction.  Eventually I told her that I had really enjoyed our interactions and conversations, and hoped that they would continue.  “Well, there is always Facebook,” is not exactly the response I was looking for, but it definitely could have been worse.  So we resumed our online dialog as I headed back down to LA, with a cast on my arm.

I Learn How Important Tendons Are

The following Monday, I took one of the other counselors to the same doctor’s office since she wasn’t feeling well.  I managed to run out of gas on the way there, which was a bit embarrassing, but we did get there, and her visit there took hours, so we didn’t get back until late afternoon, just in time to setup for the evening paintball game.  As I was screwing a CO2 tank onto a marker, I heard a snap, and something felt funny.  I looked down, and the tip of my thumb looked wrong.  It was rotated ninety degrees at the knuckle, and bent strange.  It didn’t hurt at all, but I couldn’t move it correctly.  Once again: “well, that’s not good.”  I headed up to the kitchen to find the nurse.  Both she and MC-5 looked at it, suspecting that a tendon might have gotten misaligned off my knuckle.  It still didn’t hurt, and they messed with it quite a bit to try to fix it, but to no avail.  I called my Mom to have her set me up with a “real” doctor’s appointment the next day.  She called back a few minutes later and told me that they wanted to see me right away, so I headed out as everyone was going to staff worship.  An hour later I arrived at the hospital in Roseville with my Mom, and went into the emergency room.

I have never been seen so quickly in my life, which was pretty surprising, since a finger injury shouldn’t be life threatening, it should be pretty low on the priority list.  Within ten minutes I have been examined, and they had taken a number of x-rays.  This was followed by being left for over an hour in an exam room without any info.  Eventually a nurse came in and informed me that I was scheduled for surgery in Sacramento the next morning.  He would have left it at that if my mom hadn’t intercepted him and demanded more details.  It turned out that I had snapped a tendon in my thumb, and it needed to be reconnected before the remaining pieces had a chance to retract further up into my arm.

We arrived the next morning to discover that my operation was actually in the afternoon, but we met with the surgeon, and discovered that he had observed an operation on my grandfather’s hand many years before.  We came back that afternoon, and they brought me into the operating room.  I was not going to be knocked out for the procedure, but sedated in some form, similar to a dentist, with local anesthetic.  I was hooked up to monitors and IVs, and they put a tourniquet on my arm.  It took about an hour, and while I couldn’t see what they were doing, I could hear them, which led to some interesting moments.  I was never able to figure out if they were deliberately messing with me or not, but I wasn’t thinking totally clearly anyway, with the drugs they gave me.  It was impressive what they were able to do with only a half inch Z-shaped incision to work with.  They discovered the tendon had a clean cut 95% of the way through from my knife, and the last hair holding on for a week had finally snapped, luckily not during that rescue.  The surgery went well, and they put my whole forearm in a cast, to protect the incision, and immobilize the thumb.  I returned to camp two days later, but was unable to do much useful with my left hand out of action, besides referee paintball matches.

Just a Flesh Wound

Besides that carnival incident, most of the summer was relatively uneventful, maybe even downright boring compared to the year before.  In hindsight, the lack of challenge may have been a factor that led to my increased focus on my relationship with P.  The camp was having more financial issues, and with fewer camper registrations, they were looking for some counselors to give up their positions for the last few weeks.  Since I wasn’t in it for the money, this was like a dream come true.  They were offering me a chance to stay at camp for the last three weeks to help out, without having any direct responsibilities.

I took them up on that offer in a heartbeat, as did one other counselor who was having a rough time and wanted to leave.  I was looking forward to three weeks without the responsibility of having a cabin, just running activities, eating at the “big kid’s” table, going to staff coffee night, and other things that I didn’t get to do as a counselor.  I spent part of the first week repainting the cabins with Kodak and Paladin.  On Wednesday, as I was using a knife to scrape paint out of the tip of a roller, I poked myself in the hand with it.  They tell me that my first response was: “Well, that’s not good.”  They turned around and blood was everywhere.  The cut was only a quarter inch wide, and maybe a half inch deep on the back of my left thumb, but it bled like none other.  It had slowed down an hour or two later, but hadn’t stopped, so the nurse insisted that I go get it checked out by a doctor that afternoon.  I made the mistake of going with Paladin, whose primary contribution to the process was asking them to give me a second tetanus shot so he could get a better photograph of the process.  They scrubbed it out excessively, which was painful, and may have done further damage.  It resumed bleeding of course, but they eventually got me bandaged up in a way that even left most of my hand usable.

The next day, while I was working at the ropes course, one of Darrick’s young campers got stuck on the ladder jump.  And by “got stuck” I mean that he was on the top step and refused to come down, with a death grip on the main wire.  Sunshine was belaying him, and had worked with him for a few minutes before seeking assistance.  There were quite a few staff members around, so we soon had a whole group around.  Darrick tried talking him down for an hour, without much progress.  There was another belay system available that accessed the same ladder, so Canary saw an opportunity to help with her first rescue.  Since she was better at dealing with young children than I was, especially crying ones, I agreed to give her a shot.  I belayed her as she climbed up to talk with him.  That did not solve the problem, and she eventually deferred the verbal approach to Hercules who was trying to take the lead from the ground.  I have no idea how Sunshine did it, but she didn’t move an inch for hours, while I took a few more liberties.  With a staff member on my line, and well positioned on the ladder, I eventually sat down.  They were at it for over an hour before I decided to bring Canary down, since that clearly wasn’t working, and she was wearing sandals, which were not protecting her feet from the wire very well.  I decided that I should go up myself, and got Ox to belay me.

As I began to ascend the ladder, I started talking to the kid at the top, in what became a trademark BullsEye line.  “Do you know who I am?  I am BullsEye, from the big kid camp.  I am here because it is time for you to come down.”  I climbed up to him and we had a little chat.  He was afraid of the swinging aspect of going down, and I assured him I could minimize that effect.  I did not in any way pry him off of the wire, but I did make sure that once his one hand had let go, that the wire was not in reach for him to grasp again.  Once he had both hands on the belay rope, I slowly moved the line out toward the anchor.  Eventually I was hanging in the air with my left hand one the wire, and my right hand seven feet out, letting go of his belay line.  He only swung another foot or two, and came down fine.  I expected to have to figure out how to descend from that position, when Ox just pulled on the rope, popping me back onto the foot cable.  There are benefits to having a ridiculously strong belayer.  It wasn’t until later that I realized the significance of the fact that my injured thumb had managed to hold both of us without failing.

Camp Again

At camp, things were largely similar to the year before.  A majority of the staff members had returned, and even filled the same roles.  There were far fewer challenges that year, probably in part due to the greater level of experience of the staff members.  I continued to develop closer friendships with many of the other staff members, reconnecting after our year apart.

My conversations online with both H and P had continued for the rest of spring.  H and I had a solid friendship at that point, with fairly clear boundaries.  I was quite intrigued by P, but it was a little harder to get to know her.  As someone who is conscious of his own subjective bias, I am always looking for quantifiable evidence to back up my interpretation of the less tangible aspects of relationships.  As such, I was real curious to see if P would ever take any initiative in our interactions, or was she just putting up with my consistent attention.  It was a little past four weeks into summer before I observed that she had spoken first in one of our exchanges, which I figured was some sort of progress.  I have learned through the series of steps that progressed since then, that those changes are probably more accurately interpreted as indicators of her individual social development, as opposed to signals that her feelings towards me or our relationship were changing.  But I had no cognition of that idea at the time, and might have been slightly biased by hope as well.

My last cabin for the summer included one camper who had an obvious crush on P.  I secretly found that amusing for a variety of reasons, but at least he had good taste.  He was very impressed with her knowledge, and he totally idolized her.  Somehow I ended up helping run the carnival that week, even though I was a counselor.  Once they announced that the prize for winning events was to vote for which staff member gets pied in the face at the end of the week, my camper asked if P had ever “won.”  When I told him she hadn’t, he decided he wanted to make that happen.  He enlisted my assistance, for whatever that was worth, and I was amused and curious to see what he could do.  There was probably more Wild Oak involvement in that carnival than any in a long time, since he was able to convince all the horsemanship girls, as well as my entire cabin to assist in his campaign.

It turns out “so-and-so has never been pied before!” is a very effective way to make them a target.  I was fairly surprised when there were mobs of little Buckhorn campers chanting that a short time later.  I asked one of them if they even knew who P was, and they had no idea, but they wanted to see her get pied.  I figured P would appreciate that experience about as much as I had the year before.  It’s nice to know that people notice you enough to even bother, but the experience still just sucks.  I figured that it would be ideal for her to get that level of attention, to know that she wasn’t invisible or immune, but without the messy result.  It was a long shot, but if I could get her in the last spot, she would be called up, but not pied.  So knowing who the usual popular targets were, I started reminding the Buckhorn campers of some other names more familiar to them.  That reversed the trend, and I am proud to say that in the only time I have ever gotten involved in that process, I was probably directly responsible for 3 of the 4 names announced later that night.  I just hoped I had gotten them in the right order.  The next morning, we all headed to the horseshow, and I was in position to get a good picture regardless of the outcome.  As it turns out, it worked out perfectly.  All of the attention and suspense was there without the mess, and she seemed pretty excited at the result.  My camper was initially a bit crestfallen that she “lost,” but I pointed out that he had done an impressive job even getting her “on the podium” for the first time.

Playing with New Technology

Around then, we started experimenting with the new Red camera at work, as the first few prototypes were released.  We had tested the first HDV cameras from Canon and Panasonic the year before, but the Red camera presented a whole different set of challenges.  That provided a series of topics for me to discuss in posts on my website, further securing my position as a known expert in media technology.  We did a number of commercials using workflows I developed, using tools from Cineform and Adobe.  I also started doing more visual effects work, as my company took on more projects that required those types of skills.  My biggest VFX project was a Ford commercial, but after that we found ourselves needing a dedicated person in that role, as it was very time consuming, and my other talents were needed elsewhere.

For our next project, I worked with a company in Orange County to engineer a solid-state high-definition recording system for helmet mounted cameras, which we used for a series of stunts for Mt Dew commercials.  In the days before GoPro, that was quite a challenging endeavor.  I got to travel to the shoots to operate the systems I had assembled, which was my first time on location for our larger projects.  We did windsurfing in the Mojave Desert, skiing at Mammoth Mountain, and railway skating in the Chicago subway, so it was quite the adventure.  There were a few moments when it looked like the systems might not work for us, primarily from heat issues, but we ended up getting all the shots we needed.

There was some further discussion about the potential Navy SEAL movie, and the idea going around at the time, was for Mouse and Scott to film actual missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I anticipated that if they went, I would probably go with them, to keep the equipment in running order, and manage the footage they were shooting.  I anticipated staying on the bases to hold down the fort when they were accompanying the teams out on missions, but that idea never went far enough to work out the specific details.

We did one other project for Ford before I headed out for the summer, back to camp.  This time we had started planning for my departure earlier, and recruited a number of people to fill my various roles at the company.  We hired a visual effects artist, who we had used on one of our projects, as well as an IT guy from CLU to manage the infrastructure, and one more intern to work on projects we were doing.  Two of them stayed on when I returned, as the company was growing.

Working at NAB

That spring I was offered a job as a demo artist at NAB, the big tradeshow I attended every year.  I would be spending a week in Las Vegas, demonstrating Cineform’s software in their booth at the show.  It was the same company that had supplied me with software on my 3D Lego project in college a few years before, and I was one of their highest end customers in my job at Bandito.  I don’t do much customer service work in my regular job, I am more comfortable in a less visible behind-the-scenes role, so being a demo artist is a big change of pace.  I had done it once for Adobe at the LA Film Festival for an evening, filling in for my boss, but type of work was more his strength than mine.

It ended up going really well at NAB, once I got going.  But it took a bit to get started and really getting into a flow.  I don’t do as well initiating conversations one-on-one, but I can answer nearly any technical question possible about Cineform’s software, as well as their competitor’s.  Once someone realizes that I am a good source of new information, they keep the dialog going by asking more good questions.  I start showing them all sorts of other related features in the software, which catches the attention of others in the booth.  A good phrase I heard this year at the climbing convention was “nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.”  Once I had three of four people watching what I was demonstrating, it would really keep the questions coming, and attract quite a bit of attention.  I would occasionally have large crowds straining to hear and see what I was doing.  But if it ever petered out for some reason, I was left starting from scratch, with awkward attempts to start conversations with potential customers.  But overall it was a good experience, and I continued for the next four years.  It has helped me develop a strong relationship with a versatile and responsive software development company, which continues to be helpful to this day, if I need a solution to be programmed for a new workflow problem.

About that time, I began the first steps in an online conversation with P, which was a much more consistent level of communication than I was used to, and a good dialog on many different topics.  I was really looking forward to returning to camp that summer, but there were a number of challenges that had to be overcome to allow that to happen again.  My bosses were not satisfied with how things had gone the last time I was away that long, and they were not in favor of me leaving again.  So this time around, I started preparing and convincing them much earlier on.

My Grandmother

In late January, I received a call from my Mom, letting me know that my Grandmother had experienced a massive stroke, and wasn’t expected to recover.  She was my only remaining grandparent, who I had frequently visited in Modesto on my trips to and from LA.  She had been the original source of my Lego collection, and lived in what had been my favorite place on earth, my grandparent’s farm.  We had always been particularly close compared to the rest of the family, so that was tough.  She had not regained consciousness, and was being moved to a hospice facility.  There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained from my presence there, so I continued working in LA.  It was a hard reality to deal with, and I was fortunate enough to have a number of good conversations with H to help me work through it.  I had expected for many years that this would be the event to break open the floodgates on the crying thing, but due to the slow progressive way that events unfolded, one step at a time, it still didn’t happen.

My parents and aunt and uncle were with my grandmother in shifts for two weeks, before she passed away without regaining consciousness.  I didn’t learn until years later what the realities of her being transferred to hospice actually meant.  Reading though my Mom’s notes, she describes it as watching my grandmother starve to death over two weeks, because even unconscious, her body was still functioning independently.  Basically there was no plug to pull, except a feeding tube.  I know my grandmother was finished and as ready as one can be, but it is still not an inspiring thing to ponder.  The end is rarely pretty.

I of course did go north for that funeral.  I was only up there for a short time, but was a speaker and pallbearer at the funeral.  I got to see my young cousin for the first time since her father’s death, and realized how much my absence at his funeral was probably a mistake, from a family dynamic perspective.  Everyone plays a different role in their own family, mine is the voice of reason.  But I was headed back down to work as soon as the events were over.  I still have never seen my grandparent’s gravesite at the San Joaquin Veteran’s cemetery, since the graveside services there don’t actually take place at the gravesite, but I intend to someday.  It just has to happen on a trip when I am not passing through at 7am or midnight.

I get a Visitor

I had been maintaining contact with H as she found a job after camp at a fairly intense group home, and we shared our struggles of adapting back to non-camp life.  So when H let me know that she was planning to come visit me in November, while on a trip to explore colleges in SoCal, I was thrilled.  When she showed up, we spent the afternoon and evening together.  I showed her around Hollywood, we had dinner, and a good talk.  It was a bit of an adventure to connect up with another camp friend, who she was staying with for the night, but it was a good time over all.  It was probably the first time in my life that I had been looking forward to an event that involved a girl, and the actual outcome met my expectations.  It wasn't like anything that special had happened, just than nothing had gone wrong, and I had been able to have a good relaxed conversation with her in a social situation.  I was used to girls equaling stress, and that was the first exception I had experienced in a long time.

 

The positive aspects of that experience caused me to rethink that relationship, and see further potential, even though the age gap of nearly four years seemed excessive at the time.  So I made a point of connecting up with her when I was home for Thanksgiving, but we didn't get a chance to talk much, since we got together at group Bible study with some other friends from camp.  We continued our sporadic conversation on Facebook, and I was looking forward to seeing her when I returned home again for Christmas.  We didn't end up getting back together until the camp staff reunion.  It was good to see everyone again, and hang out together.  But H didn't seem interested in spending any time together, and it was easy to see that her focus was elsewhere.  But I hadn't had any contact with P in the intervening months, so her presence there led to some good conversations.  She being a bit older and more mature than H was also very much appreciated at that moment.

 

The weather was pretty intense, and we ended up being flooded in for a while, but I did make it home late that night after the retreat was over.  The next evening, I had a phone call with H, where we clearly defined our relationship, as just being friends.  Being pushed away is never enjoyable, but all things considered, it went fine.  It was just a return to exactly where we had started, prior to her visit a few weeks before.  That conversation was probably the most direct one I had ever had about relationships up to that point, and it established the foundation for a close friendship that we developed over the next few years, without the distraction and stress of romantic possibilities.  Any objective examination of the situation would have revealed many reasons why the two of us were incompatible.  And while I had previously recognized those issues, I had begun to overlook them after how well her trip to come visit me had gone.

Social Development

My roommate Shaun was a restaurant manager when I moved in with him, but I had hardly gotten to know him by the time I left a few weeks later.  When I returned, he had quit his job, and was focusing on screenwriting, which is basically being unemployed.  He had a girl around a lot, who I somehow never got properly introduced to during the transition, with Ben and camp, but we never really directly interacted anyway.  She had a kid, who was about six, and they visited frequently, but Shaun and I lived fairly separate lives in our own halves of the apartment.  It wasn't until much later, after I had moved out, that I came to realize that they had been together for years, and that that was actually his kid.

The previous year, I had spent nearly every weekend back with my friends at the university.  Now that I lived in Hollywood, the campus was twice as far away, but most of my friends had graduated anyway.  A couple of them had moved on to grad school, at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena.  So became a lot more familiar with Pasadena as I went to visit them frequently.  We were regulars at the $3 movie theater near the school, seeing pictures a few months later than everyone else.   I also had done a much better job of staying in contact with my friends from camp, than I had the first time around, four years before.  The advent of Facebook was of course helpful in that process, but beyond that, I was much more deliberate about that.  I correctly recognized them as my future social group if I intended to eventually move back to NorCal, as opposed to people I was probably never going to see again.  And who knows where some of those relationships might lead?  I had been very much single for a few years by that point, and while most people at camp were much younger than me, I was much more interested in Christian girls who survived working at camp in NorCal, than I was in SoCal girls who had never seen dirt, and spent too much time drinking and such.  Although I had made numerous friends that summer, there were two girls that stood out in particular.  H was not someone I would have considered my type, especially since she was a few years younger, but she appeared to be interested in me, and had clearly gone out of her way to get to know me at a deeper level that summer.  I greatly valued her friendship, and tried to keep an open mind about the future.  I didn't know P nearly as well by the time summer ended, but I had enjoyed the conversations that we had together.  We had grown up with similar backgrounds, had a lot in common, and knew many of the same people.

That fall, shortly after I returned to LA, while I was hosting a BBQ for my friends at my apartment, I got a call that my uncle had been killed in an accident on my grandparent’s farm.  He was my youngest uncle on either side of the family, and his daughter was only three or four years old, so it came as quite a shock.  I had just returned from my trip home, so after discussing it with my parents, it was concluded that there was no need for me to come back up north for the funeral.  Looking back, this was probably a mistake, but you live and learn.  The importance of being there for family members should not be under estimated.

Working with the Military

The most significant project Bandito had been involved with while I had been away that summer, was a shoot with the US Air Force Combat Search and Rescue team.  So we were cutting together footage of air planes and helicopters extracting downed pilots in training exercises for the team of special operations troops.  We eventually made a bunch of commercials for the Air Force's "Do Something Amazing" recruiting campaign, as well as a 3 minute mission film.  That piece was released on the new X-Box Live video library, and became the most downloaded piece of free content on the whole system.  This success got the attention of a number of other advertising agencies, and the Pentagon was quite pleased with our work as well.  One of those commercials ended up being should during the Super Bowl pregame show, which generated a lot of excited Bandito phone calls in a short period of time.  That success led to a variety of other projects for the Air Force, showcasing the Predator UAV units, the Space Command's rocket launches, and a variety of other non-combat roles.

Eventually the Navy wanted in on that, and we were hired to do a campaign for the SWCC team.  This unit was usually considered the unit below SEALS, and operated smaller boats used to deploy and extract SEAL teams in combat.  In 36 hours, our team filmed a series of revolutions of a training exercise in Kentucky, which involved the live fire extraction of a stranded team of SEALS on a riverbank.  The original proposal was to use that footage in a silly little commercial contrasted against civilian boating guidelines, which the agency executives had dreamed up.  Beyond that simple task, using the same footage, we were able to cut together a very impressive 7 minute mission film, as well as a few other shorter pieces, highlighting individual team members.  That mission film attracted the attention of the Admirals at the Pentagon, who began a discussion about the possibility of us doing something similar for the Navy SEALS, but in a much more extensive form.  It ended up taking years, and lots of paperwork before that actually came to fruition, but those were the first steps in the process.

Back then, Bandito had done all of that work with about four editing stations, on a basic network.  But as we took on larger projects, we needed better tools and equipment to keep up.  Through the development of a number of new technology partnerships, we ended up deploying a Fibre Channel shared SAN at the office.  Video production was a fairly new application for Fibre Channel, which was usually reserved for servers at much larger banks or ecommerce companies, so we were probably one of the smallest facilities to have one at that point.  After a challenging initial build out, due to the lack of information available about such a new idea, I was able to figure it out, and expanded it myself, using parts relatively cheaply available on eBay.

HD4PC

The transition back to LA was not easy, and I was really missing camp when I returned.  I felt more out of place than ever living in the big city, especially since I was returning to my new apartment right on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood.  I recognized very clearly that while I liked my job, I did not like living in Hollywood, or Southern California in general.  But that was the only place on the planet where the cutting edge type of work I was doing was taking place.  So I soon came to the conclusion that I would eventually need to have a different source of income, that didn't tie me geographically to living in Southern California.

To that end, I began creating my own website, which I could theoretically operate from anywhere I wanted.  Leveraging what I knew and was good at, I created a website about emerging video technology, and called it HD4PC.com.  I posted information about all of the new technology that I was using at work, at least anything that wasn't covered by our numerous non-disclosure agreements.  We had access to a lot of products and software that were still in development, and I knew more about them than most people.  So I was well positioned to accurately predict how they would be used together in the future, in wildly new ways from the current methods of video and film production at the time.

Over the next year or so I developed a small but influential list of followers on my site, who looked to me for insight on what was coming next, and how to best leverage it in actual use.  I didn't have a large number of readers, but most of them were key members of the video technology community, with their own blogs and research as well.  Most of them had much wider audiences than I did, but that was because their content was not nearly as technically complex and thorough as mine was.  But that was deliberate.  Eventually once I realize that I wasn't going to be able to make much money from the website, through advertising and such ($250 in 6 years), I had focused on being "the" expert on the topics I covered.  This resulted in people coming to me for solutions to complex workflow issues, which involved technology that most people had never even seen yet.  This allowed me to make far more money as a consultant for them, than I was ever going to make from the actual web site traffic.  But the site was the mechanism to attract those lucrative clients.  And the free information I provided on there is what allowed the value of my expertise to be recognized.

In that same period of time, shortly after returning from camp, I typed up a number of stories from that summer.  The director had been offering $5 for each story that staff members could provide, to be used as testimonials for marketing and fundraising purposes.  I never did attempt to turn them in for that, but I am assuming that my 30-page, single-spaced log of my most intense week of camp, was not what he originally had in mind when he made that offer anyway.  I recognize now that writing the stories down was just a way to process what had happened.  They remained relatively untouched in storage until last year, when I used them as the basis for a series of blog posts on here.

Back Down in LA

It is time to return to the narrative storyline, after a nine month break from that aspect of things.  When I left camp at the end of that summer, I returned to LA immediately.  After being gone for 11 weeks, there was a lot to be done there.  While Ben had been working in the office, things hadn't gone as smoothly as we hoped.  They had almost called me back down three weeks early, but that request had gotten cancelled after I made the preparations.  The issues weren't entirely his fault.  He had made a couple of mistakes, but there were a lot of other things going on at the company as well.  Two different major projects had been cancelled and a number of people had been let go.

Ben was anxious for me return, so he could escape what had become a very uncomfortable situation.  He took off after only a day transition for me to get re-acclimated, but things got better once I was back in the office.  He headed back home, but I let him keep most of the outside clients that I had been previously doing web site work for.  He had taken care of them while I was gone, and I didn't see a reason to transition back.  Since I was getting busier at the office as Bandito expanded, I didn't need the extra work, nor did I have time for it, and Ben was trying to get his freelance web programming enterprise off the ground.  So the addition of my previous clients gave him a jump start.  And that is how I got out of the web design business.

When I got back, I soon realized that Mouse, the company president was treating me very differently than he had before.  We didn’t usually directly interact very much anyway, so it took a while to notice.  I was probably the only employee in the office that he treated with the slightest shred of respect, and that was much more pronounced when I returned.  My boss is the one who brought it to my attention, attributing it to my absence at camp.  “He can’t figure out how someone as smart as you can still believe in God.”  And it clearly challenged his existing world view: that you have to be stupid to believe in God.  And I continue to challenge that view to this day, without directly rising to his occasionally provocative comments, attempting to draw me into a debate that is never worth winning.  But my decision to forego three months pay and obvious career ramifications to go work at a “Church Camp” for the summer definitely made a statement at work.  It tied my clearly different lifestyle, which everyone was already aware of, to an explicitly Christian connection.  It allowed me to demonstrate and share my faith in a very powerful public way, through my actions, without preaching at anyone.

I work with many strongly opinionated atheists, but I have managed to maintain their respect of both my views and my lifestyle.  Some would say that comes at the cost of forgoing any explicit evangelism, but believe that merely representing the alternative to their worldview through my actions in a consistent and genuine fashion, is a stronger message than anything I could verbally say to them.  And most of them do not hold their views out of ignorance of the other options.  Many were raised Catholic or in various Christian backgrounds.  It is a conscious decision at the end of the day, it always is.