For me it never really kicked a lot of teeth in. I started off at a very small college in the Midwest, and so for a few years I made about a dollar a day. I got a couple jobs, and was able to buy a home pretty easily, but I never really enjoyed myself there. So I moved on up, and ended up with a job with one of the biggest companies in the world at the time, but I wasn’t making a ton, and I didn’t really like the company.
I went to college for Film and Television School, which did nothing for me besides give me a bunch of useless degrees that I’ve never really been able to do anything with. After that I did something that ended up working out really well for me, but I just had to go my own way for a few years.
I started up my own company at this time called Xtend Studios in 1999. It was just another company that I’d started with a small group of friends at the time, and that’s it. The first year it didn’t actually take off. We started up in that first year, and I was at two different studios, doing four hours of audio editing and two hours of digital art that we never actually produced. I worked that eight hour day, and had just one shot in the whole eight hours, which is what you probably would imagine.
It was just basically me and my friend David, who was a co-founder at Xtend at the time, in this small office. It was kind of a weird office, and pretty empty inside. When we started, it was a hobby. I still had no idea how this all worked, and how many companies there were like that in New York at the time. I don’t remember much from it, but I do remember going to a few other conventions at that point, and that was it.
After that, with the start of the Internet, all of a sudden that’s not the place you could start your company. You actually need to do a bunch of work. So I moved to San Francisco, and then to Los Angeles, and then LA again. I got another contract with Xtend Studios and I did all these shoots with the team there.
Fast forward to 2001 and I was doing a lot of stuff for that company. And the big thing was that I was still very interested in art, in what was going on with video, and at that point, I was still making