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I began as a drummer for a local band, Alternative, back in high school. The band consisted of my brother, a couple of friends and myself. We played around the circuit trying places like Troubadour, Goodies, etc. but not really finding a niche. At this time, I also began looking at the lighting end of things. Sound had always been covered, but there was never a real "lighting" guy other than someone to push buttons on a beat. That's about the time I started JP Productions out in San Bernardino, California. I bought some pars, some truss, a couple of genie towers and NSI control. I thought I was hot-stuff. I really knew nothing of beam angles, color selection, anything...I just knew I could plug all of this stuff in and make it flash really fast and cool.
About that time, there were some friends that ran an underground radio station and we doing a festival out in Redlands, California. They did one every year, but this year, it happened that the normal "lighting" person/company couldn't do it and asked if I was interested. This was my first time jumping into the fire. Knowing I didn't have near enough equipment, I called some vendors I had started relationships with and, wallah, I rented a lighting system. It consisted of 4 25' scaffold towers (2 front and 2 rear) a bunch of par bars, 2 front of house followspots, and 2 rear spots up in the scaffold. I have the video somewhere...I'll look to see if I can do a capture from it. I thought this was the coolest thing around and I have been hooked ever since.
At this point in my "career," if you can call it that at this point in my life, I had the opportunity to have a lighting designer take me under his wing. I jumped at the chance since I had never really taken to college. I knew what I wanted to do and couldn't find the right place to express it. I was able to work on TV Pilots, music videos, some rock-n-roll concerts and theater. He taught me color theory, fixture placement and lens calculations. All of the information he passed on has never left me.
Jump forward many years...I have since worked on theater, TV pilots (that never made it), videos, rock-n-roll and theme parks. I have worked for Flying by Foy. I free-lanced with Production Arts as a Pani specialist and Auto-pilot technician. I spent 8 years at Disneyland in Technical Services. These are the parks entertainment technicians that handle all of the entertainment venues, commercial shoots, special events, whatever. I found myself as one of the head electrics for special events and film shoots. I also became master electrician for the parade route in Disneyland for the last few years that I was there. If you saw any commercial or TV special from Disneyland from 1991-1999, I probably worked on it. 2000 brought the next big step in my career. It was then that I was asked by Walt Disney Imagineering to transfer from Disneyland up to the Imaging and Special Effects department to work with the large-format projection end of the department. Since I had the Pani experience from Production Arts, I jumped from one ship to the sister ship.
I was asked by Saddleback Valley Community Church to redesign their worship center and incorporate moving lights and a new controller. After all of the design work was finished, they asked me if I would be interested in staying on-board to man the system. I had to jump at the chance. Saddleback gives me the artistic freedom I was looking for, as well as being able to have the time to free-lance out here and there for lighting design, upgrades, and operations for various facilities and concerts.
Since joining Saddleback in 2003, I have worked in Hong Kong at Hong Kong Disneyland, gone back to Disneyland as a Technical Director for a Halloween show, done several design and installations around Southern California and a new design in Houston.
I hope you found some of this information interesting...if not, then you probably stopped reading this long ago and didn't get this far. For those of you that made it, thanks for reading and drop me a line if you have any questions.