DISTANT LOCATIONS

I always love to travel. My work travel adventures started with walks on the beach with my Bullmastiff, Kimba. I used to take Kimba out at 6 AM every morning to the beach in front of my house. I often ran into an interesting character who had two very engaging dogs that used to play with mine. It turns out this fascinating person happened to be Carlton Chase, one of the top, if not the top, directors of the time. We only talked business once. A week later, I was on a red-eye to Charlottesville, Virginia, to design a commercial for him. Three weeks later, I was on a plane to Nepal, then Cambodia, and then Washington DC for an Oracle Super Bowl spot. It was a blurry five years of research, special visas for faraway places, and planning travel with Carlton and his producers.

 

I developed a special skill set for foreign locations. Armed with only a good knowledge of fabrication, a French dictionary, and a metric tape measure, I would go to West Africa or anywhere else in the world by myself and actually get quality sets built. These were built by people who only possessed a handsaw, a tape measure, a hammer, and a willingness to do a great job. Some jobs felt like cheating, like getting on a seaplane to turn a hotel exterior into a small airport in French Polynesia. Other jobs were hard-earned. In Mali, I slept in a dried mud hut with a dirt floor, awoken before dawn by a call to prayer on a loudspeaker, served with Nescafé and a baguette loaded with dead flies. I loved every second of it, and still do.