Atmospheric cinema.

§ 02 — OriginHow the studio got here

Hand surgery had grounded the extreme-sport side, and the simulator started as therapy — thumb work on the sticks to bring the joint back. The obsession came later. Endless hours on the sim, perfecting an art before the first rig ever left the ground.

First subjects were bikes on the local hill. Then moto. Then the drift track — a whole new type of people, met one weekend at a time. I was the only drone out there for the first few years. A lot of smashed and broken rigs lit the path; everyone who joined later was walking that path. The fun is plural now; it didn’t start that way.

Drift Week 6 [confirm: year] was the inflection. Two weeks straight, roughly eight hours of flight a day, chasing forty different cars — learning each driver’s line, the tells, when they’d send and when they’d coast. About 2 TB of raw FPV came out the other side. Probably the most uninterrupted hours anyone has logged flying drones around drift cars.

Back to Aspen the following winter, and snowsports filming picked up again. The Peak Skis plate came out of that season — Bode Miller, JT Holmes flying a parachute over skis. Around the same window, on-mountain coaching and filming for a few well-known clients whose names live under NDA.

The work split commercial after that. Real estate — sub-250 through doorways instead of orbiting the exterior. Backcountry shoots on snowmobile and on foot, the whole rig on my back, hiking all day to be there when the light was.

GRC and the Green River MTB plate with Dom Megali — the last properly fun shoot before the calendar filled up commercial. After that, a fashion plate with Virgil Ortiz in Cochiti — release-restricted, but the work happened. The studio sits where it sits now because each one of those weeks taught the rig something the next brief uses.