This is a little story about my career path. It might meander a little but it has taken me to some pretty great projects and people. 

I had two areas of emphasis in college: Camera Department as an Assistant Camera Operator and Post Production as an Editor/Assistant Editor. Camera work was usually short-term and easier to find so that is what helped pay the bills when I got to L.A. I met DP John Frost early 2009 through a job posting. He would bring me on to whatever jobs he could as his AC. Those days, I didn’t make a ton of money. We did short films, feature length films, and opening title projects for big budget films. 

When I was hustling as an Assistant Camera Operator, a UW-Oshkosh alum that has seen a film I edited, knew of a job opening (night Assistant Editor) at Go Go Luckey. Go Go Luckey specialized in reality/unscripted shows like Jockeys, Ghost Lab, & Paranormal State. I interviewed and got the job working nights, plugging tapes in and digitizing offline footage, multi-cam grouping, getting final episodes ready with hi-res material, troubleshooting conforms, and labeling B-roll. After a few months of that, things slowed down before the holidays and I was out of work again. 

I was looking for my next gig that holiday season. I applied to work on a Documentary that ended up being Emily Levine’s last big project. She’s done a few TED Talks and used to write for Designing Women. I was the Assistant Editor for Tina Hirsch (ACE) on this; Tina became a close friend and we’d spend our lunches driving in my old tan Mazda to whatever chicken restaurant she wanted that day and chatting about editing and life. This job lasted about a year before I had to part ways with the team as the project didn’t seem to be nearing completion and it was sporadic hours some weeks. 

I headed back to Go Go Luckey for a Lead Assistant Editor position on History Channel’s Decoded. That lasted a month before I got a call to interview at Stereo-D in Burbank. 

At Stereo-D, I worked with Milton Adamou, Greg Emerson, David Cowles, and Cris Mertens, to name a few. We were called Stereoscopic Editors. Our job consisted of analyzing editorial turnovers from our clients and conforming all the footage perfectly so the artists could convert 2D footage and VFX to 3D. We played everything 3D in context in high end digital theaters so we knew that the 3D was working well and looking good. This position even took me to Sydney, Australia where I worked on Mad Max: Fury Road for a few months. 

At lunch one day, a coworker got an email about working on a film (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk) being planned in Atlanta. This coworker wasn’t interested in going to Atlanta so he encouraged me to apply. It would be filmed at 120fps and in native 3D. That means that the cameras would be shooting 5 times faster than normal film cameras and with two cameras per stereo rig. Ang Lee was at the helm so I was very interested. Ben Gervais was the Technical Supervisor for all the 3D equipment. I interviewed on the phone with Ben and got the job. We were a small team of 3 people in the dailies lab, we were hired because the standard dailies companies (Co3, Panavision, FotoKem, etc.) were not equipped to handle 120fps footage in 3D. It required a completely new workflow that Ben had created with off-the-shelf equipment and file storage. It was my task to copy camera footage to HDD storage, sync the 3D footage to its matching camera, backup all footage to digital tape (LTO) twice and ship one copy offsite to Sony. At the end of each day, I also rendered selects from the previous day’s shoot for daily screening. We set up in Atlanta in an old Factory/Warehouse on the edge of town. Carpenters built a 3D theater. We spent weeks before filming began getting equipment assembled and running cables between all the various workstations/servers and equipment. Filming there lasted a few months then we packed everything up and took it to Morocco for a few weeks of filming. After that, it was moved one more time to NYC in Ang’s office. 

I was now out of work but also just enjoying life. I did a short stint at Stereo-D helping with a film that needed remastering. I knew my way around 3D films pretty well at this point so I got hired to work on Independence Day: Resurgence, which was being converted to 3D. I was the only stereoscopic editor on the postproduction team. 

Looking for my next show, I turned to a friend and old coworker from Stereo-D, Greg Emerson. He was recently hired at WB Animation to help reform the postproduction workforce and modernize standard practices. He brought me on as an Assistant Editor. I worked on everything from doing QC passes on episodes to helping conform footage for LEGO DC animated films. 

I got a call from Ben Gervais again. They needed crew for another 120fps 3D film, Gemini Man. I said yes and gave Greg at WB Animation my notice. This film was being shot in a similar way to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk but with completely different equipment and we were no longer using off the shelf storage and render machines. We were also upgrading from a 10GbE network to a 50 & 100GbE network so we could work substantially faster. Machines were more bespoke and our storage server was over 3 Petabytes. We spent months getting ready for filming in Savannah, GA. We also went to Budapest with all the equipment for a month and then to NYC for the final stages of postproduction. 

I told Greg that I’d like to come back to WB Animation. He managed to find me a position as Editor on Yabba Dabba Dinosaurs. From there, I worked on a few episodes of DC Super Hero Girls. The “DC Girls” team and I worked well together so they had me edit more and more episodes. Right before the Covid Pandemic hit, I was the only Editor on “DC Girls.” I quickly came up with a solid workflow so I could work remotely and proceeded to edit animatics and animation for all of season 2 from the bedroom of my apartment. I moved to Wisconsin after a year in “lockdown.”  I also edited the film Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse remotely. During that film, I also edited animatics for Batwheels and Meet the Batwheels shorts. I was fortunate to move on to editing episodes of Little Ellen and then edit animatics for Tiny Toons Looniversity.