Los Angeles · media production technology · pure Go · AI systems

Thirty years of asking "what if we just didn't do that part?" I keep showing up ten years early and removing things until they work.

• C4 — Content-based identification for media production (SMPTE ST 2114:2017). Separate what a file is from where it lives — deduplication, provenance, and asset tracking without a central authority. A 23 KB manifest can describe 8 TB of media. The files keep track of themselves.
• go-openexr — Pure Go OpenEXR. No CGo, no C libraries, just the format spec implemented from scratch.
• absfs — Abstract filesystem ecosystem for Go. 35+ composable packages: in-memory, encrypted, cached, copy-on-write, union, NFS, S3, SFTP, FUSE, and more. Plug them together like building blocks.
• godoc-mcp — MCP server that gives AI agents access to Go documentation. Because your copilot should actually be able to read the docs.

More pure Go format implementations — complex binary formats without CGo:

• go-jpeg2000 — JPEG 2000 with HTJ2K support
• go-alembic — Alembic 3D graphics interchange
• go-blosc — Blosc compression with SIMD-accelerated shuffle

AI infrastructure — Building an AI assistant ecosystem from scratch: persistent memory through local screen recording and OCR, encrypted task coordination with atomic checkout semantics, always-on audio with local-only processing. Privacy-first, no cloud dependency for personal data.

Three decades in visual effects and pipeline engineering, starting at Cinesite Hollywood in 1995. VFX credits include Avatar, Titanic, The Fifth Element, Fight Club, Armageddon, War of the Worlds, The Day After Tomorrow, Stuart Little, and Men in Black II — 39 credits across a career spent removing walls between artists and their work.

Coined the term, designed the architecture, and led the team that built the first virtual production system — the original prototype for Avatar, alongside Rob Legato and James Cameron. Every LED stage you've seen since started there.

Before that, created the first photorealistic digital face replacement — a CGI young James Brown for the Experience Music Project — and pioneered HDR image-based lighting for production VFX, both at Digital Domain. The face work predated Benjamin Button by nearly a decade.

• SIGGRAPH 2001 — "The Future of Color" panel with cinematographer Allen Daviau ASC
• The Magic of C4 — ETC at USC, on indelible metadata and agreement without communication
• The Cinema Content Creation Cloud — Introduction to the C4 framework
• C4 Framework Universal Asset ID — Content-addressable identification for production
• Global File Management with C4 — Managing assets across distributed systems
• Implementing C4 in Workflows and Software — With Joan Wrabetz, practical integration
• NAB Show 2017 — SiliconANGLE theCUBE interview on Avalanche and cloud production
• FMX Conference — The Day After Tomorrow visual effects, Stuttgart
• SMPTE 2015 — C4 ID system presentation, led to ST 2114:2017 standard adoption
• HPA Tech Retreat 2017 — Panelist, "Production in the Cloud: Pitfalls and Epiphanies"

The best solution usually isn't a better answer — it's realizing the question was wrong. Most of the complexity we build around is just unexamined assumptions. Remove the assumption and the problem often disappears with it.