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How I started in the business Ben Grossmann (left): From a kid in Alaska to the Oscar stage, with a stop as local weatherman inbetween. Grossmann, whose parents were amateur photographers, took photography in college at the University of Alaska. In fact, it was his part-time job shooting weddings and local events that helped pay for school. "Eventually I got a gig as a photojournalist for the local newspaper after I had moved to Fairbanks. Then I started stringing for the Associated Press. One day while covering a news event, a reporter for a local TV station said, 'We'd love to hire you as a camera- man at the station.' I had never held a video camera, but I said, 'Sure!'" While he was working at Tanana Valley Television in Fairbanks, he ended up being the weatherman on the evening news — his first experience with green- screen. "Because the weather in Alaska is boring as hell — every day is cold, it's just a question of how cold — I started adding little things to entertain people, like shrinking me down and flying me around the screen or making me appear in different places on the weather map. We then started shooting local TV com- mercials and using visual effects and motion graphics, and trying to emulate what I saw in big movies. I had no training; it was just a question of finding the software that could do things like that or making a hack by shooting forced perspective stuff or by doing basic chroma keying composites." After a few years doing this, Grossmann's station got the opportunity to work the red carpet at the Emmy's in 1999 — he was almost 22 years old. "It was my first time in Hollywood, jostling on the red carpet, and I thought I could do this." In the winter of 2000, he push-started his old Saab in Fairbanks and didn't turn it off until he reached San Francisco — seriously, he had a broken starter. As many discover after reaching Hollywood, getting a job doing what they want isn't so easy. "I soon realized that all the jobs I was vaguely qualified for were union jobs, so nobody was interested." He ended up at a temp agency where someone introduced him to visual effects agent Bob Coleman at Digital Artist agency. "He couldn't represent me as a client, but he did hire me to reformat resumes and encode reels and put them online. So that was my first job in visual effects — formatting the resumes of visual effects supervisors." After working there for a while he told Coleman, "if an entry-level opportu- nity comes up that none of your clients can take it, send me for an interview; if I can't do a good job I'll walk away with no pay — no harm, no foul, just give me a chance at it." His opportunity came when a client needed basic rotoscoping and paint on a TV show called Return to Halloween Town. "My pitch on the interview was I have basically zero experience but that I'd work my butt off to figure out what- ever you need me to do, and at the end of one month if I haven't done a sat- isfactory job I'll leave and you don't have to pay me. That is how I got started in visual effects: roto and paint. I just worked my way up from there." He freelanced at many companies — such as Uncharted Territory, Amalgam- ated Pixels, Pixel Magic, Ring of Fire, SF's The Orphanage — and he landed his first full-time staff position at The Syndicate. They were bought out for one project, Alice in Wonderland, and when that ended he went to Pixomondo and started on Hugo. Enter Oscar. When I was a kid I earned an old 8mm wind-up Kodak camera by mowing my neighbor's lawn for months. I loved watching horror and sci-fi movies, especially on Fright Night With Seymour (a local LA show). So naturally I started making my own hor- ror movies by rounding up the neighborhood kids. I would use monster make-up tips gleaned from the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. But my dream of getting into the film busi- ness was kind of squelched when my father told me that you either had to be rich or know someone in the business to achieve that. So, I moved on and did a lot of odd jobs in my youth from bar boy to parking cars to selling frozen steaks door to door. I learned locksmithing as a teen and started repairing alarm systems in 11th grade. I eventually started my burglar alarm company. But back when I was working as a park- ing attendant, I was stationed at the Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood when Star Wars opened there. I would watch people wait in line for hours, go into the theater ordinary people and come out floating on air. As it became hugely successful, the stories about George Lucas started to filter By Terry Curren Owner AlphaDogs www.alphadogs.tv Burbank Curren (white t-shirt) working on his student film, Interview With Terror. out and when I realized he was an ordinary guy who made it into the busi- ness, it changed my thinking. So I eventually went back to school and started taking film programs and TV production classes. During this period the woman who cut my hair mentioned that her husband produced low-budget commercials. One day he called; he was looking for a second AC for a music video shoot that weekend. Then he asked if I was familiar with the Arri SR-16 camera. I had never seen one, so… but I, of course, told him I knew the camera, and he booked me for the job. So I had three days to learn the camera inside and out. I went to a rental house and that's all I did. Practiced loading film, set- ting up and tearing down the camera, etc. The day of the shoot comes and the director is Tim Newman, who did all the ZZ Top videos. It was definitely "game on" with a very pro crew. It was tricky bluffing my way through. The AC would say something like "go get me a hi-hat" and I had no idea what the heck he was talking about. So I would run over to the camera truck and grab a nearby grip and ask if he has seen the hi-hat. Usually he would point something out right in front of me and I would feign surprise. So that is how I bluffed my way into the industry. I kept getting booked by this producer and others in various posi- tions and eventually worked my way up to production coordinator. I was still attending school during this time and wanted to make my own feature, but couldn't afford the cost of film. The other students in the TV program only wanted to work in the studio, so I had nearly unlimited www.postmagazine.com Post • April 2012 continued on page 51 21