Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541592
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 19 various bits of studio gear we had at the shop. As I recall, Martin was doing the film with local filmmakers at Four Square Productions in town, who had done the first film in the series, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. When Martin told me about it and how John Astin, Gomez Addams in the original TV series The Addams Family was a star in it, I was thrilled to participate, even though I think I only made about $500 on the entire project. When we were doing the work, we recorded our sounds onto a stereo Nagra recorder, which Martin would then transfer to 16mm film stock to cut into the film track. It was a thrilling experience, and following that, Mike Krewitsky invited me to help doing music tracks for other low-budget films which came into the shop. Of course, I had very little idea of what real film post workflows looked like since we were doing the work in local studios with timecode sync'd 24-track analog recorders locked to U-Matic video decks. After a while there, I also started doing synthesizer sounds for the manufacturer Kawai, and was making contributions to CD-ROM sound libraries made by Optical Media International for the Emu Emulator II, and then the Emulator III which was one of the first "affordable" (It cost between 10K and 12K) 16-bit stereo sampling systems which was still quite a bit less than the Fairlight and Synclavier systems which were a lot more costly. Through this work, I first met Steve Boeddeker (now a distinguished sound designer at Skywalker Sound), who would become a friend whose paths would converge with mine quite a lot going forward. Following all this, I ended up moving to San Francisco in 1991 with my wife, and lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury for about two years, before moving the Bernal Heights District. The cause for the move was becoming a part of a sound library company which had spun off of Optical Media, and as the third person on the team, I assumed all the engineering and creative development for the company which ultimately expanded to a sound board add-on for the popular E-mu Proteus synthesizer. This also led to my first meeting Randy Thom who we called on for advice with a sound effects library strategy for the company's product line. After two years at Invision, Andrew Calvo, a good friend of mine I met through Blank Software in San Francisco, invited me to apply to work at Digidesign in East Palo Alto. Digi had a more proper employee benefit package which I was very interested in since my wife Teresa and I were wanting to start a family. The timeframe for this was just at the initial development phase of Pro Tools (about a year before Pro Tools 1.0 was released) and I took a position in their customer support department where I answered technical and customer support calls. As anyone who has done that sort of thing, most of the calls were from people having problems, and that was a great experience in being able to de-escalate irate customers and help them get running. A side benefit was being able to talk to a bunch of my musical heroes like Wendy Carlos, Trent Reznor and Dave LeBolt, who later joined Digidesign and ended up in senior management. After about 18 months, I was invited to join the Software Engineering Department as a tester, and I specialized in post- production applications for the company. I worked mainly in the Pro Tools application area but also was on the team which developed the CMX auto conform application Post Conform (I promise this backstory does pay off!). Also while I was at Digidesign, I was able to do some moonlighting on some Mac CD-ROM projects for Rhino Records, and did the audio asset mastering for the Peter Gabriel Xplora1 CD experience which was a partner release to his Us album, In addition to that, I also was contributing sounds to the infamous "Poke in the Ear with a Sharp Stick" CD-ROM sound libraries OSC (the creators of the DECK software recording system) which made a bit of a splash in the industrial movement back in the early '90s. While Dave Lebolt and I were doing research on the product, we again went to Randy Thom for input, along with EFX Systems (where I first met Harry Cohen) and following that, I was developing a real interest in getting into film sound design—and candidly, I still had little appreciation for the nuts and bolts practices of film sound! So with that, since we had added our first child into the picture, my wife was really wanting to move back to Southern California so we could be closer to our families, and I looked into seeing if I could start working at Digidesign's training office in Hollywood. This was something that didn't happen—due to the good fortune of being able to interview for a sound editing position in the new feature sound department at Universal Pictures with Rick LeGrand and Harry Snodgrass. I seemed to have a path to move to LA and start in this new endeavor. Very ironically, two days after I spoke with them about doing their team, Randy Thom asked if I would be interested in being an assistant sound editor on the Robert Zemeckis film The Frighteners. Though it would have meant moving to New Zealand for the project—I sadly had to say no, mainly because of not wanting to move out of the country with my wife and daughter, but also due to the faith that Rick and Harry had shown in inviting to join them at Universal. Sooooo … (we finally made it to Hollywood)… As those in film sound know all too well, working in the business is a gig by gig sort of affair—and though it was a pretty busy time, it was competitive in general. So, my time at Universal was actually relatively brief—about four months—though in that time I had fully entered the Editors Guild and was a bonafide sound editor… After being laid off there after working on two films, one of which was Kevin Smith's Mall Rats, I was now looking for work. At about that same time, I got a call from Digidesign to go to the NAB Show to demonstrate and talk to customers about the Post Conform package, and in that trip got