Brandon Thomas
"My Dad is a Petroleum Engineer and Entrepreneur. He and a few partners started a company about 20 years ago that now has over 500 employees. Growing up he was managing oil rigs and other projects; when something went wrong there was a lot of money on the line. So I think watching him work hard to build that company inspired me to want to build my own someday. My Mom continues to be incredibly supportive as well."
"I went to a film festival in high school with a short film that I’d made with a friend. I rotoscoped a light sabre in Photoshop frame by frame. It was terrible! At the film festival, there were two amazing short films by a guy named Scott Rice from the University of Texas, so I decided to go there."
"Two weeks out of high school I was at UT, and then transferred to the film program a semester or two later. Since I had learned AVID in 9th grade, I was immediately pigeonholed into post because I knew the software. I was very interested in cinematography, and I knew I didn’t want to be a writer or director, so I took mostly production and post-production classes."
"Scott Rice ended up being my professor for a few courses, and I told him I wanted to work on his next project, no matter what it was. A few months later I gripped on his set, met one of my best friends and colleagues, and helped in post as an assistant editor as well."
"I spent my time editing or shooting anything I could, and somewhere in there I got pretty heavily into motion graphics and VFX. I did 3 or 4 internships, one that led to an assistant editing gig for a TV Pilot, which I followed up with another internship at a large ad agency in town. Immediately after I graduated, I was brought back as a teaching assistant for the Advanced Animation course and began simultaneously began freelancing with a production company in town, Beef and Pie Productions, as an assistant editor and motion graphics artist."
"They started working on a documentary called "Man on a Mission," which followed Richard Garriott's journey as a private citizen who paid 30 million dollars to train and go into space with the Russians. Their in-house editor was solely on that project for the next year and a half, so during that time I was cutting almost all of their spots, doing any graphics or visual effects work, and coloring."
"I’d been dabbling with color a bit before, but I fairly immediately started coloring their spots. They weren’t getting all of their spots graded, and in my mind, the better the spots looked, the more work I would get. So that's how I really got serious about grading. That was the start of a gradual and organic transition from being hired to edit, or to do motion graphics, to being hired almost exclusively to color grade. On top of that, I was freelancing on commercials, corporate projects, reality TV shows, and independent film projects. Basically I was just working as much as possible."
"In 2009, a colleague started a "post meet up," which was where anyone working professionally in post would go to a bar and drink beer and talk about all things post. It was mostly made up of freelancers and independent film guys, but that was there I met Ted Griffis, who's now my business partner at TBD Post. We immediately bonded over tech and software issues, and felt we were on the same page when it came to our approach to work."
"Ted and I were both freelancing, but we started working together so we could take on larger projects. We have overlapping, but mostly complimentary skill sets. I would do motion graphics and color for the editorial jobs he was getting, and we’d just pitch in to cover each other where we could."
"We eventually decided to find a space together. We looked for about 6 months to find any office space that physically had separate. We eventually found the building we're in now, and rented the second floor. We started with just two rooms, built them out using our existing gear, and have gradually grown and continue to build from there. Over the past few years, we’ve gotten to do a lot of great work, and have some really exciting projects on the horizon."
"I feel that I owe a lot of any success to my parents, because they gave me the opportunity to make a go of it. They were always incredibly supportive and told me to do what I enjoyed doing and that the money would follow. There have been plenty of other amazing friends and mentors along the way, but at the end of the day, I feel fortunate to have the relationships I have personally and professionally. I'm excited to see what the future will bring."