Dave Sampson. It was actually a Flint RT, but it was still pretty cool. Not cool enough to buy or use, but cool nonetheless.

It started at King Cut in 1998. We had a license sitting on our MXI Octane Smoke system and it seemed like such a waste not to use it, so I started poking around, screwing with plug-ins, tracking random things to one another. It took a while to break free of my Smoke mindset, but I knew immediately that Flame was where the action was (wow, that's a horrible and completely unintentional pun, my apologies).

For me, Flame is almost like the hot girl that was a little out of my league. I flirted a lot, and it took a while to work up the courage to ask her out (and this is where the analogy breaks down), but getting dropped in the deep end at Imaginary Forces and having to swim to the surface whilst tweaking a far more experienced artist's Batch setup with clients looking over my shoulder made me realize that Flame and I were meant for each other. The software is so powerful and so intuitive that you never feel like it's going to let you down.

Working on "Minority Report" and helping to design the look for the prevision sequences. We pushed the boundaries of what I thought I could do with the box, and managed to deliver a lot more than what Spielberg was expecting, I think. Plus being able to go to any movie theater and buy a ticket to see something I worked on was all it took to get my parents to stop hounding me about finishing college.

One of my first gigs at A52 was a cleanup shot for a car commercial where a cat burglar is descending from the ceiling of a museum on these tiny wires, "Mission Impossible" style. Naturally, there was a thick network of speedrail rigging her up that needed to be removed from the shot, which was a fairly long lateral panning dolly move, looking down past her and showing pretty much the whole room. I pulled a 3D track, grabbed some stills, and over the next several hours basically rebuilt the room from painted clean frames. That shot, I'm fairly sure, is what got me the staff gig at A52, and I've zealously defended the honor of the 3D tracker ever since. There are literally hundreds of examples of day-saving though. It seems like every session there's one crazy thing in the film that's been driving the client crazy since they started offline, or something so horribly wrong that they're afraid they'll go bankrupt trying to clean it up, but it's usually no big deal. Flame, after all, can fix just about anything, right?

Probably "Minority Report." I was part of a great team and the sequences turned out really well.

Psyop's "MTVhd" promo is a thing of beauty, and Imaginary Forces' sequence for "The Island of Dr. Moreau" was what made me want to do whatever I had to in order to get a job there.

I occasionally stray to a certain desktop motion graphics tool, but only because I haven't figured out how to get Flame to run on my laptop.

Aside from the money? It's nice to be able to create good work with nice people, and it's probably the closest I'll ever get to being a ninja.

Do not talk smack about the 3D tracker. Learn to use it properly and it will save your ass. Christian Boudman taught me that...