I grew up exposed to a lot of technology.
My hippy parents had a hands-off style of parenting, so I got to explore my creativity. I learned to read very early, I used my father’s hand and electric tools as soon as I could safely hold them, and I learned very early that I could do tasks and earn money to buy cool thing.
A sort of timeline:
Age 4
Learned to use a soldering iron, knife and screwdrivers.
Age 8
Read at a highschool level.
Started doing electronics projects. Using my father’s drill press, hand saw, electric drill, jigsaw.
Got into photography, processed film in my closed darkroom, made a terrible enlarger.
I was building low and medium explosive. Never fuesd, time or remote detonation. By medium, I mean we needed a primer charge. Scary.
Age 11
Reading at college level.
School is boring.
Started programming the TRS-80 in basic at the local Radio Shack.
Age 13
Got a job after school, worked for $5 an hour cash( like $20 an hour in 2025 money). Got into phreking, sold a lot of blue boxes to Central American kids’ parents.
Learned 6502 machine code, assembly, FORTH.
Bought lasers, synthesizers, Atari 800. Pen Plotters, printers.
Built a wire wrap 6502.
Luck
I had help getting to this point, My parents had a hobby shop in the San Fernando Valley, centrally located to the FX studios and Walt Disney Imagineering.
Their customers came in, saw a little kid working on circuit boards, and mentored me. They explained electronics, integrated circuits, mechanics. I was fortunate to be situated so ideally.
I worked a lot of odd jobs
Motion Control
Projector Repair
Software
Graphics
I explored more computer stuff, bout more stuff, learned C and started playing with some computational photography.
I met my wife, started building a life with her.
My Big Break
I got a job at Clairmont Camera where I was hired to repair lenses but quickly graduated to doing design work.
I invented a bunch of stuff, but two of my devices were really cool.
Squishy Lens
I had this idea about lenses. What if you “swapped” some characteristic of a lens for it’s opposite. What if instead of being made of hard glass, a lens were soft, supple and compressible.
The owner and VP loved the idea, game me a small budget to prove the idea and it eventually became this:
That is a composite lens element made of silicone sheet, silicone gel and polycarbonate sheet squished with the aid of 3 high high power motors.
I won an Emmy award and an Academy Award nomination for the Squishy Lens.
Image Shaker
The Image Shaker solves the problem of making explosion and vibration effects on set. I had the idea of making a variable prism. I demonstrated the idea to the owner of the company with a trash bag with holes cut in the sides, glass plates glued in to plug the holes and filled with water.
The idea evolved into this. Microcontrollers, motors and glass. I designed it in the mid 1990’s and it is still being used today. I won an Emmy and an Academy Award for the invention of the image shaker.
I left Clairmont Camera after 8 years and moved on to Panavision.
Panavision
I developed a lot of test equipment, meta-data stuff, abd sort of acted as engineer glue between electronics and mechanics.
I did develop a really cool velocity based motion control system to augment and assist camera operators using telescoping cranes.
When you take the operator off of the crane and replace them with a remote head, they lose inertial feedback. They can only remove errors in their movements through practicing a shot.
The system I designed, called Backpan Plus read the position of all the axis of the crane, calculated the aim of the camera, and added control signals to keep the crane aimed at its target. These signals were adjustable in gain, so you could add a gentle assist, or the operator could go “hands off”.
I left Panavision after another 8 years and went to work at a story-based, human centric innovation lab called Applied Minds.
Applied Minds
I was hired on to make lights blink on and off on robots. That was my actual job description.
I worked on a lot of different things from work with a bunch of different branches of the United States military, to casino experiences, to helping photographers and videographers.
I can’t talk a lot about what I did there, but my speciality was innovation and non precious prototyping.
I did build some really cool things, one was a 20 gigapixel camera, and the other was a color night vision system.
The color night vision system was really cool because I went totally tangential to conventional thought, and built several devices using the principles of human perception to make devices that worked exceptionally well.
Covid
Covid turned everything upside down.
I bounced around, landed at Panavision again, and retired a year later.
We moved to the south west of France, and here I am now, doing some product design and Writing.