In a post from 2009, I said to ‘Expect big things from this guy in the near future!!!” Well… that future is upon is. My brother, Jamie, is a few days away from graduating the Art Institute Atlanta with a BFA in Digital Filmmaking and Video Production. He has been kicking some serious ass in his department, and I am SUPER proud of him! In preparation for his transition from full-time student to full-time name-taker… he launched a website featuring his work, and put together an impressive reel!

I am really excited for him, and can’t wait to see what awesome things he is able to tackle in the future.

In light of all the skateboarding I had been doing, I decided that I wanted to try another board sport that I said I would never do again. Snowboarding. Back when we lived in Albany, NY… I fell snowboarding and broke my left arm REALLY bad. I can still feel the bone-scarring through my skin. I swore I would never snowboard again. Well… I guess I swore wrong. Back in January, Erin, Cody, and Chris were headed up to Cataloochee… so I decided to join them. I was never any good at snowboarding. I couldn’t get my edges down and always got hurt, so I was apprehensive about how I would take to it this time around. Miraculously, it clicked, and before I knew it I was shredding pretty well, and having a BLAST.

So I decided to buy the most METAL looking snowboard I could. And started going every two weeks all the way through March until the mountains closed. This particular trip up to Sugar, it rained on us the ENTIRE DAY. Soaking wet from head-to-toe is an understatement.

SOAKED. But that smile on my face is pretty much priceless. Snowboarding gives me that same feeling skating does, which is totally indescribable and absolutely badical.

In fact, we were so soaking wet, that we had to take a break and drive to the laundromat to dry everything off. Lieze snapped this cool photo during my laudro-nap. Once our clothes were dry, we suited up and hit the mountain again. Good good times.

In January I was also lucky enough to be able to attend the ASD Mob Seminar up in Charlotte. What an AMAZING amazing experience. Ian, Dave, and the crew as ASD know their stuff like no other team in Formula Drift. There. I said it. The fact that they wanted to give back to the grassroots community with a program like this is really too phenomenal for words. The things they taught us totally made me re-think everything in regard to car-setup for drifting. I seriously can never thank these guys enough.

In May, I ran in the Warrior Dash with (left to right) my brother Jonathan, Dad, Mom, Tom Hanks from Castaway, and parent’s friend Joel.

Everyone HAS to do one of these races. It is REALLY fun, and a very wild race! The obstacles are actually a nice way to break up the distance. I won’t lie – you get filthy dirty in ways you can’t really imagine until you do it. But it is an absolute RIOT.

Also, in May… I picked up another guitar I’ve always wanted. Definitely a staple for both heavy metal and rock and roll. An Epiphone Flying V. I also snagged a sweet li’l mini-stack by Marshall. Needless to say my office is a thrash-zone!

In June, Alex let me borrow his Honda Camino, and I went with he, Eugene, and the rest of the Swoop Jockeys on a 50+ mile moped ride from Cabbagetown all the way to Northpoint Mall for the Cars and Coffee meet. I don’t know what it was about these crappy old neglected things… but I kinda fell in love with them. As fate would have it, Chad wanted to get rid of his old Tomos A35… so I bought his.

I started sanding the paint off, put new bars, seat, controls, taillight, and made a super-sweet headlight cover with a broken Hella cover from the truck. I also made a nice chain guard out of an old ’71 Georgia license plate. I still need to get the rest of the teal off the bike – but it is definitely starting to feel more-and-more like mine.

Every Sunday morning, I’ve been riding around Atlanta with these guys… having a blast. We rode through the historic Pullman Yard, and I happened to have my Contour on me. This was a really fun ride!

In light of riding basically mini-motorcycles, I decided to take an MSF class with Cody, Wes, and Alex. It is something I would recommend to anyone who wants to ride a motorcycle of any kind. We learned a lot, and I feel a lot safer when I ride now as a result. We all passed both the riding and written tests… so at the end of the weekend, we all got our motorcycle licenses! After we passed our riding tests, we were allowed to swap motorcycles for a lap or two. I put a quick iPhone video together. I’ll warn you though – if you aren’t one of the people in this video – you won’t find it super-exciting hahaha.

I’ve been working a bit on tidying up the garage as well. I plan on putting up pegboard on the left-side wall to help free up some space. There isn’t a lot of room to move around in there, and I want to try and help it breathe a bit. The BMW has been sitting for a while, with the rear-end still broken. I’ve been too busy with work to really mess with it, but in the next month-or-so, plan to have it back up and running again!

When life picks up speed, the momentum can be somewhat overwhelming. In wake of that momentum, I have totally neglected my own site. Typically I hate the “Oh, sorry I haven’t been posting much, but hey… I’M BACK” entries. Yet, here I am. So much has happened in the past 8 months that I don’t even know where to begin. Over the next several posts, I would like to get things back up to speed with what has been what in my neck of the woods.

The biggest change in my realm, is undoubtedly work-related. In late November, I was contacted by a local Atlanta studio to freelance on a showreel of animated print advertisements. The studio is Artistic Image, located in the King Plow Arts Center in west Atlanta.

The studio is really awesome, and does amazing work! After working on the showreel I got to work on some really fun spots for Cartoon Network LA. I was given all of the graphic elements to animate, and the concept was that ordinary back-to-school items would transform into giant aliens and battle it out. Really really fun spots to work on!

Then in January, the crew at Artistic Image asked me on full-time for a 6-month contract to work as a part of the team to revamp the historical Stone Mountain Lasershow.

The project would entail video-mapping technology to create the illusion that the mountain comes to life… giving the show an added element of dimension that the traditional lasers could not provide. It was an incredible project to work on, and took an immense amount of work to complete. Everyone on the team at Artistic Image did an amazing job. I had a chance to see the show’s opening July 4th weekend, and judging by the crowd’s reaction – this renovation was a HUGE success! I feel very honored that I was able to work on a project of this magnitude, and one that has such a historical significance to the state of Georgia.

This spot on 11alive.com gives a little more insight to what we did.

June marked the end of my contract, at which time, I was offered a full-time position as an animator. I graciously accepted the position, for I have been wanting to transition away from designing for web/print for well over 5 years. I was finally able to make the jump to motion design full-time, and I am incredibly happy about it. Everyone on the team at Artistic Image is super-talented, and most of all – really great to work with! I’m really excited that they gave me the opportunity to come on board and be part of the team!

Anyone remotely close to me knows that since childhood… E.T. leads the ranks as my all-time favorite movie. For Christmas this year, Lieze contacted Canadian artist, Caitlin Gallupe, and commissioned her to paint the best portrait EVER.

Lieze HATES this photo I snapped right before I shaved the crazy beard. She hated the crazy beard in general… and thought it would make for a funny portrait to have E.T. and I together, similar to the bathroom scene in the movie where Elliott and E.T. are looking in the mirror… only E.T. accidentally sets my beard on fire with his lit-up finger.

TOTALLY awesome. Who else has their portrait with E.T.? Michael Jackson… and now me. This gift was super-thoughtful and awfully sweet, considering how much I love the film. I can’t thank Lieze and Caitlin enough for this amazing portrait.

Be sure to check out Caitlin’s website to see more of her work… or even commission a painting of your own!

For Christmas this year I decided to make wood signs for the family lake house. The roads to get to the house are narrow enough to fit one car, and you have to make several turns down these roads to eventually get to the house. I think this is probably standard lake protocol… so that is essentially what I set out to do.

It had been a while since I had done anything artistic that didn’t involve a computer… and while a computer was used in the process… for the most part – it was pretty hands on, leaving me smelling like burnt wood and sawdust. These aren’t completely done… but I’m at a good stopping point so I thought I would share.

First thing… I set the type and set up some separations to cut some vinyl.

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TND Driftoberfest from Alexander Grant on Vimeo.

Alex is coming up on the video tip! I love drift videos that focus less on the driving, and more on the dumb stuff we do in the pits… like skate, and throw hamburgers. Driver differentiation: I am running with the windows down/lights on… Axel runs windows up/lights off.

I entered a photo contest via Twitter for a shot at winning an iPad. The only stipulation to this contest, was you had to process your photograph using the Plastic Bullet app from Red Giant. Looks like the photo of our cat gazing down the staircase made the first cut!

Completion Time:		1 Minute			Software Used:		Red Giant Plastic Bullet

Finished up a cool website for Matt Powers! He wanted it to resemble a newspaper format… and after a few revisions, I think it turned out pretty rad! Definitely different from the sites that I normally build. I dig the simplicity of it.

DriftParty.com

Completion Time:		7 Hours			Software Used:		BBEdit, Adobe Photoshop CS3

Our German DriftMechanik counterparts, Axel and Martin, made their way over to the US for a visit… and hung out for about a week. To celebrate, we made a mad-dash to fix my broken diff, get the car prepped, truck packed and get to Nashville Superspeedway for TND’s Driftoberfest.

As we left, I stopped to make sure the trailer tires were filled proper. When we got the gas station, we found one tire was totally flat. So I put air in it, and as I did, a nail shot out of in from the pressure build… leaving a perfect hole in the tire. With my patch kit at home, I bought one from the gas station. It looked like a stick of bubble-gum would have worked better, but alas – I plugged it with a vow to recheck in a few miles to make sure it was holding. We didn’t even get 5 miles down the highway and I noticed sparks shooting from the rear of the trailer. Then came the vibrations and some minor sway. Just like that – I had my first trailer-tire blowout EVER.

I had a spare, but it was a 14″ passenger tire… which wouldn’t make it through Monteagle. All the other tires on the trailer are 15″. We called every place we could with zero luck getting a spare tire at 1:30am. The one place we did find only carried 16″ tires. Lucky for us, Sammy from Tiger Racing hadn’t left for the event yet, and had a spare for us. We limped the truck/trailer to his shop just a few miles away, where he pretty much saved our lives!

We drove straight through to the track, and arrived at 7am before the gates opened. I was exhausted, and still had to break in the new diff clutch plates. Got that taken care of, and it was track time.

After my first run, the diff was already clunking. I decided that I had too much invested in fixing the car/making the trip so we all could drive – so I made the executive decision to drive it anyway. Axel and I drove the car all day. I had a blast watching Axel drive my car. I had never had the chance to see my car in action like that. He got a TON of seat time! It looked like he had a blast.

Marlow’s Corolla was knocking, so at the end of the day we put his car on my trailer, and I decided to drive the BMW on the street back to his place. Bad idea. By this time, the rear end of the car was making horrible clunking noises. Alex was shooting video out of the passenger-side of his truck, and I floored it for the shot. BAD idea. The car dogwalked to the left, right towards his truck. I thought I was going to hit him… hence the ‘oops’ face.

Unlucky for me, after that… everyone took off and I couldn’t drive over 40mph. Equally as unlucky – my cell was in my truck, so I had no way to call anyone, and they all took off at a normal pace. No GPS, no phone, malfunctioning car, and no idea where to go. Eventually, Tony Schulz realized something was up, and rallied the troops. They had to box me in, and we all went 40mph for about an hour back to Marlow’s. It was CRAZY.

The next day, we hit the Import Alliance carshow for a moment, and then hit the Wave Country skatepark.

I skated in the pool for about an hour, then we hit the road back to Atlanta.

Shortly after our return, Martin and Axel (left to right) had to catch a flight back to Germany.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. I feel EXTREMELY lucky that this crazy motorsport has introduced me to so many amazingly rad people. Martin and Axel are two of those people. I wish I took more photos while they were here… but I was too busy having a BLAST hanging out with them! I can’t wait to meet up with these dudes again!!