Life After Disney

   Welp.. I don't work for Disney anymore.  The current direction they are taking involves no internal game studios..  so what happens next?   I believe I run around in a panic and show people what I am really good at in hopes of landing some work for the future.

   I've been at this for 20 years.  Well actually 19, but I will round up because I'm still going at it.  I picked up a small, but stressful gig using Animation:Master in 1997, and hopscotched my way into a decent 12 1/2 year run at Disney Interactive Studios.   I am very grateful to have found friends there, and work with them on such great products.

   It's not every day that your boss convinces a billion dollar company to hand over the helm for 5 years and be successful at it. When DIS shut down,  I joked to people that we had the cure for cancer, free energy and world peace on our servers. Now that its closed up shop nobody will ever know what fantastic ideas we had brewing.

Well... almost nobody. We still have our talents and our demo reels.  Here is my latest demo reel:

   I chuckle a little, because the last time I made one of these to get a job was back in the mid 90s. Each applicant had to have everything recorded to VHS cassette tapes. You needed a boardroom table to display your paintings, sketches, and prints. You had to go to Kinko's to find the best quality resume paper and manila envelope to present.  Now look how far we've come! Chances are, you're either reading this from the comfort of your home computer, on a cell phone sitting at a bus stop, or in the bathroom. You can cross reference, ask questions, and double check facts on me within minutes of reading this.

Ain't life grand?  Now its time to get back to the job search.

The Apatasaur playground

I visit my brother Matt a lot. He is my technical sounding board, runs MK1 Manufacturing and is just a plain crazy scoundrel to hang out with; You'd like him.

  One day a few years ago he asks me,"Remember back when we made dinos?  I want to make a dinosaur swing for the kids." What he was talking about was two decades ago.  He and I and my other brother James had built 40 sculptures for an outdoor museum up in Ogden, Utah. We were teenagers and didn't know much of anything other than resin and fiberglass is strong...oh and everyone in the 90's could stick-weld.

   So to me his statement wasn't that we should, but what can we do better now that we've mastered computer design, CNC machining, woodworking, electronics, 3d modeling...basically all of the things we didnt know that were inaccessible at the time that had slowly become our hobby and professions after 20 years.   I thought about it.. noodled a few sketches and figured, what the hell..

I started the model two years ago.  We  started construction in January '2015. We tightened the bolts on it to 12 tonnes of concrete in June,  and by july, had a platform to play with.   My brother and I like to tinker. over the next year added all the RGB lighting and bluetooth speakers and clubhouse and slides and climbing nets for the kids to hang out to their hearts content. 
  
But the most fun of it is all of us adults swing on the swings chatting and dreaming about the future just as much as our kids do.  

As it all turns out, the kids didn't need to go outside to play. We did.