AIRBALLS
After a shoot in Colorado, I was talking to the agency producer and she asked me, “why is there not an app that can make it easier for me to find directors?” Caught me off guard because I’d been in the business of selling directors to agencies for 15 years, there seemed to be a need. With my experience in interactive production and the resources I had to design and build the database, it seemed like a no-brainer. I really loved making this explainer video with some good friends - but building and testing the app was a bitch. Ultimately, the app has been taken offline because of a low adoption rate, but may come back to service a different community of content creators.
When you get to meeting lots of creative people, it’s easy to jump at ideas that don’t take a lot of effort to explore. I was thinking about different ways to interview bands and showcase the personalities of musicians while mixing in live performances - thought there might be some legs. So, I got together with a friend that was good at improv and another that shot reality TV and we made this little pilot. The film test was great, the band was not great, but the idea was there. It just needed cooler bands. So, this hit the cutting room floor and there it stayed, lost on a hard drive somewhere.
A friend and I were exploring the idea of a documentary photobook that would have video content attached, for an extra dose of “real life”. Naturally we thought, let’s explore people’s backgrounds via their tattoos and what they mean to them - except let’s do it for specific subsets of American culture, like NASCAR. The idea of interviewing NASCAR fans about their tattoos was too much fun to pass up. This one found its way to the bin eventually, and never really got passed around much - but I’ll never forget that wild day in a dusty parking lot outside of Phoenix.
I started out as a lowly broadcast department assistant at an ad agency in San Francisco. I didn’t know that I wanted to do film and video production, I just knew I wanted to make commercials. On weekends the Avid would be available and I had this old footage my friends had shot at a Marilyn Manson concert, so I decided to teach myself how to edit. I was a big fan of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, and I used that as my guiding light. All things told, I really wish somebody would’ve taught me how to story edit and spellcheck better back then.
My first time in Yosemite on a backpacking trip, a buddy and I kept riffing on “What if Dolemite was an Environmentalist?”… and I could never get that idea out of my head. Yeah, I’m definitely not the right person to be making this kind of content, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how funny that could be. I’d made a pitch deck for a different animated pilot and got some contacts at Adult Swim, so I decided to swing for the fences. I partnered up with a good friend and we started working on a pilot. Turns out animation is tedious and expensive, but we found a way to make it happen. Sadly, after pitching to Adult Swim we found out they had another animated blaxploitation in development. We did get a meeting at Fox! …. and a pass ;)