“Your half-ass is most people’s full-ass.”

- Recent Client

When I was 14 in I realized that I hated getting yelled at by coaches in my small North Texas town and needed an easy PE credit. Also, I was a poorly coordinated kid who’s friends all skateboarded so I would follow them with a VHS camera instead of risking injury. These two truths would collide with a spectacular media technology teacher who saw something in me and taught me video production and editing in high school.

In this class I was ironically coached and yelled at more than my peers in football. My teacher was a champion quarterback for the Dallas Diamonds, an all female football team, and used the energy of a football coach to demand the best from me in my video work. I would learn how to edit on Final Cut Pro to such a proficiency that I was tutoring 40 year olds having to switch from Avid to FCP on the side. I would also win numerous awards in teen video festivals and even be recognized by Apple as the youngest person in Texas at the time to be fully certified in the editing software.

I toured colleges in high school and was disappointed that they were basically going to make me relearn things that I was already getting paid to do professionally. For that reason, and the fact that I realized I didn’t need to go into six figure debt to do keg stands, I made the hard choice to skip college and get right to work.

In 2007 I wrote a feature length film called Thrown with my friend from the video class. We spent 6 months writing, then 6-8 months developing the film and begging for money to make it (this was pre kickstarter we had to make business plans and stuff). Somehow we raised 30,000 dollars to make it and shot it in one month. It took another year to edit and was released in 2009. While admittedly it was not a smash hit it did win me a Best Young Director award at the Ventura Film Festival and most importantly taught me that there is no obstacle too large to overcome. Even to this day when I worry about bills and the day to day tragedies of life I remind myself “well, it’s not as hard as making the movie”.

In 2010 I was hired by the same school I took the media tech class in to help special needs students with video production. I loved making a difference in kids lives and showing them the art of movie making. Sadly it did not pay what some would call a “living wage” so I supplemented my income by doing graphic design work on the side. I always loved screwing around in Photoshop and one day showed a former boss of mine at a fast food restaurant called OC Burgers a mock-up for a new menu design and he hired me on the spot to do all the companies design and marketing content.

When the teaching gig came to end I continued to design logos, menus, and even got some national jobs for big companies like 7-Eleven and Stripes designing iced tea urns in the store. My work can still be see in some convenience stores in the South.

I then got a semi-full time job doing photography and video work for a salon called Stylemakers. They would eventually discover that it is way more profitable to put hair on bald guys heads than to cut it off so they hired some surgeons and turned it into The Hair Restoration Institute of DFW. My main job was doing before and after videos of clients. They would sit with me in a small studio and tell me about how miserable losing hair was on camera in exchange for a discounted operation.

While I had a awesome career in the works and some of the most supportive clients and friends I had one dream that would haunt me, I wanted to live in California. I had family in SoCal and would visit every chance I had. Any vacation time was by default spent driving up and down PCH. I felt like I was visiting the Garden of Eden when I was on the west coast. I’d leave back for Texas and feel an insane sense of disappointment in myself for not living there and having to retreat back to where I belong. Then one day in 2016 I decided that having a dream this relatively easy to achieve unfulfilled was just dumb. I was 28 and thought you know, I got ONE more chance to do something crazy while I’m still in my 20s. So I packed my 2007 Ford Focus with everything that fit in it, sold my desktop computer for a laptop, threw away everything else that wouldn’t fit in and left a little room for my black and white cat Kitty and drove 1500 miles to my family in SoCal to start a new life.

With my families place in Lompoc as a launchpad, I happened to find a mentor to teach me about website building and got some of my first clients making websites for wineries in SB county. Then eventually I made my way to Santa Barbara proper and started making friends and new connections to restart my video skills. I joined a small video production company and quickly became the “head of development” by finding new clients for them. I would also learn that running a company in California is not quite as easy as the weather so I scaled back to freelance video edit for various studios with a reputation for meeting insane deadlines.

While working video production one thing that always upset me was the lack of thought behind audio. Many videographers I worked with were simply photographers who set the camera to video mode. I would have so many arguments over the importance of good audio that I decided that this is now my new crusade. I studied everything I could to master audio and suddenly found myself as an engineer.

Like many american males I fell in love with Joe Rogan and started getting into podcasting at this time too. Many, many people have a voice but are not the nerds like I am about microphones and stuff so I found yet another job. This one is currently my favorite gig.

Now I continue to live in a small cabin Santa Barbara with my beloved Kitty. When I’m not slacking off from work I enjoy riding my self-built electric bike, hanging out with comedians, and thanking God for the beautiful world I get to live in.

If you’re a potential new client/boss and you read all this props to you. If you think it’s a little too long and indulgent I can understand that too, the rest of the site is more HR friendly to peruse and see if I’ve got the talent you need but I think it’s important that you know who I am as a person too. One day software will replace most of what I do, but what it can’t replace is my nature. I am someone who values honesty and integrity above all else. What you see is what you get with me and like Batman I maintain a strict moral code of incorruptibility. I will always tell the hard truths before the easy lies. I sincerely love my clients and when they call me just to tell me how they are doing. My success is measured on their success and I consider them allies. If you need an ally like this, contact me!

Let’s Make it Happen!

-Justin

justin@jwalk.media