AnimSHOES_01
The years have put many miles on the treads of my shoes. In an 8 hour day I can walk up to 12 miles all within a 8x10 shooting stage. I am very much like a gerbil in a cage, spending the entire day enclosed in a habitat custom built for me.
Professional foot ware
NIKE Air Jordon’s 1985 where my everyday work shoes while animating the California Raisin commercials at Will Vinton Studios in Portland Oregon.
There was also a basketball hoop set up in the garage area of Will Vinton Studios. It was usually a 3 on 3 game play that most often would end in some sort of injury. I jammed my toe pretty bad one game. JD Alley, a large man too big to be a storyboard artist, landed his full weight on my big toe after he made a shot. I immediately left the game and went home with the throbbing pain in my foot. Around 2am in the morning I woke up in a sweat and realized that my heart had moved from my chest to my big toe. The pressure of it beating was explosive. How could a heart fit inside of a toe? Somehow it has and it did. When I turned the light on I could see that my toe had swollen up. The pressure behind the toe nail had forced the skin to balloon. I wanted to pop my toe to relieve the force of the beating. I grabbed a steel pin, a bottle of tequila, a box of matches, pliers, and a drill with a small bit. I first struck a match a and held it under a pin that I was holding with the pliers. When the pin turned red hot, I stuck it under my toe nail. Pushing it in. I found this odd that I felt no pain. When I pulled the pin out, a good deal of ooze and blood and puss streamed out. My next try was to get as much of the juice out of my big toe. I picked up the drill and placed the drill bit on the top center of the toe nail and made a little mark on the nail. I put the drill back down and took a few nice gulps from the bottle of tequila. Again, lining up the drill on my toe, I slowly squeezed the trigger and the motor strained to rotate at such a slow rate. The bit started to scape then shave into the toe nail. All that was needed was for the bit to slowly bore it’s way through the nail hoping to hit a geyser moment of release and pressure. My finger slipped. The drill motor engaged full speed ripping the nail clean up and off. The toenail spinning on the end of the drill like a gruesome propeller of blood and puss. The spray hit the white wall and machine gunned across my cheek. I released the trigger and look down at the toe. The exposed meat looked like the wet sand under an overturned stone. The pain was gone,
