I was always blown away by how fast Chad could pick up new skills and learn new things. His passions were primarily focused on art, animation, music, and design, but he could figure out and master pretty much anything someone could throw at him.
Chad and I started a multimedia production studio together in 1996, that is still operating to this day. We had been talking about doing something like that for a while.
Then one night, we were hanging out at his apartment in Denver, Colorado, and we watched a movie called “The Gate to the Mind’s Eye”. It was a 3D animated movie, a genre that most people didn’t even know existed yet. We were immediately inspired, and decided “that’s what we should do.” I had done a little animation work prior, and Chad didn’t have any experience. We figured, “what the hell”, and went for it anyway.
He learned the 3D animation program, Lightwave 3D, pretty much immediately and started creating really trippy, cool animation clips right away. That quickly led to us establishing our company, Hyperspective, as a legit player in the film and video industry.
Some of the projects that we were doing at the time were ground-breaking in the 90’s. We were not only creating 3D animation movies, but had the opportunities to create large multi-screen live shows, design and build large-scale 3D stereographic design, and a bunch of cool things that people had never seen before. Chad was really a pioneer in the industry.
The NASA Challenge
Chad would engineer new ways to do things just to solve nearly impossible problems. For example, we were hired to do some visual effects, 3D titles and to fix some space footage for NASA and IMAX for a 3D IMAX film called HUBBLE 3D. Some of the astronaut footage that was provided by NASA was almost unusable. It had a lot of static in the video and sometimes would cut out or disappear for seconds.
Normally, we could fix stuff like that by creating CG astronauts and objects that were in the scene to replace anything that was damaged or missing. They wouldn’t allow that, and told us that we could only use the footage provided and the rule was “NO CG”. Chad took it on, and within days, had fixed most of the footage. The IMAX director and NASA consultants saw what he had done and couldn’t believe it. They said, “we actually thought it wasn’t possible to perfectly fix this, but you guys pulled it off.”
Chad had a knack for creating magic. He blew people away constantly with his work and talents. He pushed me and my own skills and will continue to inspire me to reach the next level. His work is still out in the world being distributed and seen worldwide. Chad influenced many minds to believe that the impossible is possible.