The Way Home - 2011 In Review

In January of 2011 I left my job of four years. Since I was a fixture of the company at the time (one of its four department supervisors) it was a messy lot to extract myself from, dragging on two painful additional weeks into the new year than I had originally planned. I trained people, documented all the software I had built over the years and gave multiple tutorials about how it was all set up. And then, like that- I was gone.

Unfortunately I had no break, save a very short weekend, in between the end date at my old job and the first day at my new one. The transition was rough, but I was excited to have a change of scenery. While I'd never worked there before, my new company has been a San Francisco Bay Area visual effects landmark since the late 1970s. Having expanded as large as it has since then, it had attracted many of the people that I'd worked with over the last 10 years of my career.

These friendly faces welcomed me as I ran into them in the halls, in the campus's gorgeous cafeteria and even on public transit going to and from the studio. It was like a giant vfx class reunion, which was really fun for me for those first few weeks as I got settled in. I also had the pleasure of working on a film that I actually had high hopes for- not a common thing in our business to be sure.

But the honeymoon was never meant to last. In March I was laid off, a few days after my birthday. I had prepared for this- my contract was up and I wouldn't be needed until the next round of projects, set to launch sometime in the summer. Truth be told, I was ecstatic to have a few months to myself, to catch up on the video lectures that I'd abandoned the year before and to continue work on my blog series, Becoming, that I'd started at the end of 2009.

Most importantly, I took this opportunity to pursue a trajectory that had been eating at me since I'd finished 2010's In Review post: the composition of electronic music. This was something I hadn't done since the mid-late 1990s, and those attempts were novice at best. Nevertheless, I jumped in and found myself surrounded by a strange and unfamiliar landscape.

When I'd made electronic music before, there were about three manufacturers of software for the endeavor which couldn't do very much. Decent synthesizers and samplers were rack-mounted hardware with tiny monochrome lcd screens. If there was a computer involved at all, it was assuredly a Mac and everything was REALLY expensive. You couldn't compile a decent setup for anything less than a few to several thousand dollars. But that had all become ancient history. Now high-powered equipment and software were ubiquitous and completely affordable to almost anyone who had the will to get their musical ideas recorded and distributed, with near-professional results.

Among the flood of new electronic music pioneers that had adopted these cheap and widely available technologies, many had taken it upon themselves to share their various workflows via screen-captured demos and tutorials on youtube- for free. I was blown away by the openness and camaraderie that had sprung up in support of contemporary electronic music composition, and I was even further inspired by the growth of the movement's online communities, which had exploded since the internet's infancy in the 90s.

I spent weeks researching and learning the new methods. I read message boards, blogs and reviews, watched the aforementioned youtube demos and downloaded trial software. I totally felt like a kid in a candy store- it was all so fascinating to me, but I had many questions, the most pertinent of which was: What was the minimum amount of funds and effort that I needed to get my own small electronic music studio up and running?

I learned pretty quickly that I already possessed most of the components that I would need, so I dusted off my old Roland keyboard and early 90s-era electronic drum pad and plugged them into my computer. I downloaded a program called Reaper, an ultra-cheap but powerful stand-in for more expensive professional audio/music creation programs like Protools and Cubase. I bought discounted synthesizer software from a company called Native Instruments using old credit card reward points I had laying around. I learned online how to connect everything up, and I was ready to ROLL.

I thought I'd start out by recording some drum tracks over an old A Capella Imogen Heap song that I'd always thought would sound better with a beat. The result was awful- not in concept but in my own personal execution of it, meaning that I couldn't keep the beat at all, even while using a metronome. For hours I tried to sync up, changing tempos, modifying drum pad configurations, changing sticking methods, but made no progress. I decided after much frustration that my high school era drum skills had been lost, and if I was going to continue to do this I needed to practice every day and get a lot better... or maybe I just needed to assume an alternate, perhaps more intimate method of composition than swinging sticks around.

It was around this time that I discovered Maschine, a complete hybrid hardware/software musical composition system. Initially I didn't feel like I was Maschine's target market. It seemed like it was more geared towards legendary hip hop producers and beat makers, with its grid of soft, square pads that triggered drum and keyboard samples, its design deliberately echoing the famous Akai MPC series drum machines used throughout the 1980s and 90s. I couldn't possibly be worthy of such an awesome tool... but it was SO DAMN COOL!!!

After much hemming and hawing I decided to get myself a Maschine, and since then, it has been my closest musical ally. I was looking for a completely fluid creative musical experience and Native Instruments nailed it. Finally I'd found a tool and workflow that was immediately satisfying and something I could look forward to using day after day. Music composition now stood in sharp contrast to the much larger, nebulous projects I'd habitually committed myself to in recent years. It was now conceivable that I could finish a whole song in just a few hours with Maschine, whereas if I were writing a screenplay or philosophical essay, the end product was inevitably months in the making before it saw the light of day, if it ever did.

Over the next few months I expanded my setup. I revived Sadie's old art shed that had sat idle by the side of our house for a year and a half, turning it into my own little hideaway and re-dedicating it exclusively to musical creation. In a slow evolution that took place over many months, financed through more credit card rewards points and some cash that I'd earmarked long ago for the purpose, I eventually constructed a respectable working studio where I could write my tunes in peace from the rest of the world. I now work regularly making music in my studio about 2-3 days a week. Thus far I've created seven finished tracks and started countless others. You can check out my latest work, if you are so inclined, at naturalrevenge.net.

nat ~ rev studio, dec 2011

In addition to making music I continued my studies in philosophy, read stacks of nonfiction books, marathon-watched Akira Kurosawa films and Anime and spent considerable amounts of time in libraries across San Francisco. As Sadie would say, I was the busiest unemployed person she'd ever seen.

In celebration of Sadie's 40th birthday, we spent the month of July in a medieval village along the Dordogne River in Southwest France. We ate, we drank, we attempted to speak French and had an incredible time with a procession of friends that stopped by and spent time with us along the path of their various summer travels throughout Europe. If there ever was a question of whether or not you can eat enough French food, the answer is unequivocally yes. In all honesty I had to take an entire week off from Foie Gras during the trip because just the thought of eating any more of it just made me sick to my stomach. However- one thing I never got sick of were Pommes de Terre Sarladaise (potatoes cooked in goose fat). These little buggers are, I imagine, a lot like what crack must be like. I believe I may have eaten some every single day. Yum.

When we returned from France I had expected to get right back to work, and in fact I was even given a job offer AND a start date from my most recent employer, which were, after a celebratory sushi dinner, quickly snatched away, leaving my unemployment status intact and without much of a clue what to do with myself. At that point I had been off for five months straight, and while I'd been enjoying myself, funds were running low and options in the Bay Area for alternative sources of income in my field were running out.

Outsourcing and relocation of vfx work for the benefit of studio tax breaks were now running rampant, effectively moving a lot of Hollywood's visual effects work to places like Vancouver, London and Singapore. Since I wasn't too keen on moving to any of these places, and with a new dog, three cats, my wife's painting career and a mortgage, we weren't exactly about to move to another country to chase the whims of Hollywood's bottom line. I needed to figure out something else.

I decided the best thing to do was to diversify skill-sets and to invest myself into a new career in computer programming, something I could easily pursue in the Bay Area when the vfx industry here finally evaporated. I started out with two months of intensive mathematics re-learning using one of my (now) most favorite sites on the internet, Khan Academy. Salman Khan did an excellent job setting up this fantastic site for educating kids and adults alike, with exercises as simple as 2+2, extending all the way to advanced calculus and beyond. And of course the entire thing is free of charge (though they do take donations).

After only a few months of practice I successfully got over the bastard math anxiety I had developed during my high school years. I had not only passed all of the exercises (there really is no "passing" on Khan Academy- you have to get 100 percent of the answers correct before you can move to the next subject!) but I absolutely dominated concepts that I never could understand back in high school (I dropped out of calculus my senior year). Now I'd actually begun to enjoy doing math, a turn of events that my high school self would not have been able to foresee in the slightest. I can see him now, sitting at a classroom desk, wrapped in a black trench coat, head in hands, muttering "It's not possible..."

In November, after nearly eight full months of unemployment, I was finally called back into work... for three weeks. I tried to figure out what exactly, in addition to refreshing and possibly having to re-learn the company's entire pipeline, I could get done in only three weeks, but I didn't argue- I needed the cash. I dusted off my spurs and jumped into the grinder. By the end of the three weeks I'd finished a whopping three shots for the movie I'd worked on, one of which would almost certainly never make the cut. It was an absolutely pathetic yield for a vfx veteran with 11 years of experience.

In addition to my job ineptitude, the social landscape of the company was much more tricky for me this time around. I found myself actively avoiding connecting with people I knew from my past period of employment there because I got sick of explaining that yes, I was only there for three weeks, and yes, I had actually been out of work all of that time since I'd wrapped in the spring. A lot of them figured I was just there the whole time, hiding out somewhere in the company's maze of real estate, and that they just hadn't happened to run into me since March.

But something heavier than damaged pride weighed on me during this particular vfx season that I'd never experienced before. I began to loathe little things, like the black paper covering the huge bay windows of the office, deliberately plastered up by artists who wanted to shut the daylight out in order to sustain the dark cave-like atmosphere that I'd known for so many years. Instead of being the cool, artsy environment it had been in years past, it was now just depressing. I couldn't bolster the enthusiasm and team spirit that was there before. My heart just wasn't in it. I ate lunch by myself at my desk with my headphones on, did my job and went home.

The whole experience was disheartening and sad. On my last day as I waited out in front of the building in the rain for Sadie to pick me up, I decided that I was done. I vowed that this year's vfx project cycle, even if it were to resume in the spring of 2012, would be my final dance with professional visual effects.

Having no solid job prospects for the rest of the year, in early December I figured it was a good time to lend my otherwise idle hands to Sadie, who was gearing up for a major expansion of her art studio and school. I quickly took over the administration of her business's operations, organizing class lists, dealing with finances and other simple tasks that would have (and have notoriously) taken away an entire studio day from her. Now she could just paint without having to worry about all of that stuff, and I was actually having fun doing all of it, because in addition to helping Sadie it allowed me to engage in day-to-day business that was active and exciting. Ordering supplies, dealing with banks, tax people and insurance brokers, making phone calls, setting up appointments- I think I may have become just a little bit addicted to the momentum of it all, of things actually happening!

Things went so well in fact, that in mid December, Sadie and I decided to incorporate and sign a lease for a much larger studio and teaching space for her- an 1800-square-foot industrial suite with huge north-light windows and 18 ft ceilings, located on the border of the Soma, Portrero Hill and Mission districts in San Francisco. Sadie's first class in the new space was January 14th of 2012. I remain actively involved in the studio's day to day operations.

I suppose it was inevitable that Sadie and I go into business together. Aside from my disenchantment with the visual effects industry and the increasing demand for her classes and paintings, the compulsion towards entrepreneurship in my family runs deep. My mom and dad have owned a manufacturing company together in Pennsylvania that has served the global semiconductor industry for over 25 years. My sister and brother-in-law own a real estate company in Florida, actually thriving in the markedly difficult real estate markets of recent years. If all goes well this year Sadie and I will add to the list of family business successes as the new owners of SJNV Creative Associates, a fast growing and powerful classical realist art school in the heart of one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the planet.

This year overall has been a trying but important journey for me, wherein I discovered what it was like to finally grow into my adult self. My success in establishing music as a viable creative outlet, the conquering of old mathematical demons and my realization as an independent businessperson each played a part in changing me into a much more confident human being than I had been only a year earlier. I had no idea it would turn out this way, yet at the same time I feel as though it was somehow inevitable. Regardless, it's nice to have finally found my way home.

Best to all of you for a great 2012!!!