We started Good Neighbor in like 2006? Right around the time that Kyle graduated college. And I was doing freelance editing.
When you're a freelance director, you are hired to create the art, and it kind of stops there.
In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it.
I was doing well in TV as a freelance cameraman, but it wasn't the direction I wanted to go in. I directed videos and tried to put something cinematic in every one. Dialogue, action sequences, helicopter, Steadicam.
It was my very good fortune to find a mentor, Clay Felker, who started my career at the 'New York Magazine' as a freelance writer when I had to quit my job at the 'Herald Tribune' to stay home with my young daughter.
I wrote for my university newspaper and went on to freelance for a Los Angeles publication in my first months after graduating from UC Santa Barbara. I also interned at a couple of TV stations in the L.A. area.
I never expected to make the videos a full-time job. I thought I would continue to work as a freelance Web designer and just do the videos for fun. But the audience built so quickly that it became full-time.
I did freelance cartooning off and on from college graduation in 1991 through ABC News hiring me in 2003. I did a weekly comic strip for 'Roll Call' for about nine years. I sold cartoons and caricatures to 'The Los Angeles Times' and 'The Washington Post.' I drew as much as I could. It's really tough to make a living doing it.
I'm only a freelance TV presenter and, in many ways, it's all just been a massive fluke.
My father was a freelance writer/director/producer, and my mother was a stewardess for Pan-Am. It was very non-traditional.
