It was about two weeks before graduating and I received a phone call from a studio in California. The staff from this studio flew out to my school looking to hire 150 students. They brought their own computers with proprietary software and they were testing us to see how we do with their program.
It was a program to convert 2d films into 3d and we had to sign papers to agree not to talk about what we saw. It’s their secret sauce that no other company knew about. I did well even though this was something that wasn’t taught in schools at the time, not sure if it is now.
Anyway, they called to let me know that I got the job and if I can come out soon. I was so excited straight out of college I get to work on a feature film, not many people can say that! Graduation was at the end of October and to be more specific it was on the same week as Hurricane Sandy. I prayed like crazy for that storm not to hit us and it just missed the state of Florida but went right up to Jersey.
Unfortunately many people that I know were affected by that super storm. I was glad I was going west instead of back up north because that would have been impossible for me to get through those floods. Once my roomate and I had everything that we needed packed we jumped on the highway.
I knew my stay in California was going to be short because the contract was only for 5 months so we left most of our things in storage. It was a long 3-day drive but we got to see the country which was awesome. We arrived in California and began to explore, it was a whole new world for us.
We settled in and in two weeks I started at my new job, a stereoscopic artist at Legend 3D.
