For me becoming an editor has been the focusing factor
of an eclectic life.

Growing up in So California I've almost always been around 'the biz', whether it was family and friends or my own involvement.

I was exposed to music in school and took piano lessons, played clarinet in the orchestra, sang in glee club and later studied music theory. My artwork was usually up in the hallway at school. I spent several semesters in Drama class and won some awards in the Forensic League for Dramatic Interpretation of some of my own work. But, I was also President of the Computer Club and could be found at lunch at the chess club and on the weekends at the La Brea Tar Pits, in the pit untarring a Mastadon jaw.

Paint me Curiosity. Everything interested me.

Later, I spent several years hanging around community theatre, singing and dancing in a few productions, but I never found the right focus or mentor to guide me into how to start a career. Plus, I grew up in a home where the arts were "a sure way to the poor house" and "I'm not going to support a starving artist" was proclaimed from the head of the dinner table. How many of us heard that one.

In the mid 80's I landed a job administrating a children's Art School and was reintroduced to the desktop computer. Suddenly, I saw the computer as a focal point for all my talents. But, there was just one thing I had to know before I could go any further. How the thing worked. How did this box of metal take what I typed and make pictures on the screen? I spent hours, weeks, months, reading a book called Oh Pascal while taking a Pascal programming class at SMC. The book was in shreads when I finally groked proceedural programming. But that wasn't the end. I needed to know more and ended up taking a class in Assembly Programming. Finally! I understood. I understood how electricity had been coerced to make pictures and sound.

As a result of all that time satisfying my curiosity, I spent the better part of the 90's programming for game, multimedia and internet companies. I always concerned myself with what the user saw, the interface. I wanted to make the screen dance for me. But, I also found myself working with Midi Drivers and interactive music engines.

In 1999, after almost 15 years wrestlying with the beast, I left the cube forrest . I knew a fellow named Bob Gould who had taught me the ins and outs of a Darkroom and a few things about still photography and he was fiddling around with a new thing called Final Cut Pro. It was a desktop editing program that was new from Apple. I popped over to the house when he had an AVID editor sitting at the keyboard trying to ferrit out how the thing worked. I had been working with Photoshop for years and had also spent a few weeks with Premiere while working on Return To Zork for Activision. To me the interface was amazingly clear. Soon I was sitting there cutting the piece together and the AVID guy was standing there with his jaw hanging open. I had never edited anything before , but it seemed amazingly simple to me. Photoshop on steroids. Not too much later we created a company based on providing video to the internet. And the inspiration for this endeavor was Final Cut Pro. But, when the Dot Com bubble burst so did our dream, I turned to more traditional forms of editing, and worked on industrials, event videos and features.

I fell in love with editing. It all seemed so natural to me. Afterall, I'd spent the better part of my life watching TV and going to movies and working with story in one form or another. When I realized that I had found my bliss in visual story telling I picked up AVID skills and started exploring motion graphics. During this time I was asked by Friends of Ed Publishing in England, now Wrox Press, to contribute to and write several books on Final Cut Pro. Each book was a challenge, because I had to learn more and more to keep up with how Final Cut Pro was expanding and growing. And when I didn't have the expertise on a subject I went out and found an expert and interviewed them. My last book was written for Ilex Press in England and Distributed by CMP press here in the US, "Creative Titling with Final Cut Pro".

For several years I've also worked as an Apple Certified Instructor and taught classes in Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. Later because of my history with internet applications I was also able to teach Dreamweaver and Flash. And I still tutor individual editors on occasion, but I feel I'm acting more like a consultant roughing out the trouble spots.

I have never worked at a job that I love as much as I do editing. It's the only job that I have ever done where time flies by so fast. You would never find me putting in extra hours as a programmer. But, as an editor, I have never minded working round the clock to get the job done.

I work on documentaries, both news style and cinema verite. I have also cut interview shows, and several kinds of multi-cam productions. I've worked on Indie features and would love to do that again. And I'm always interested in short form.

I'm developing a few shorts, as I have a feellings I might like to direct some day. But, I'm also hoping someday to find "my director" and win my Oscar as an editor.