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.