About

Hello, I’m Beeg Martin. I wanted to say “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” but I think that’s been done. My given name is Brian so I answer to either that or Beeg. I’ve been an animator for 20+ years, a video producer for 25+ years and just retired from a 20-year stint teaching web design,  3D animation and motion design for Pierce College in Lakewood Washington. I played in a hair band in the 80s and still play sax and keys in local bars. It’s mostly covers but that will soon change. Beeg Martin - 1994 Graphics Workstation KTZZ

I spent most of the 90’s working on The Spud Goodman Show at KTZZ in Seattle doing simple graphics and credit rolls on an ancient Grass Valley system. It was my first job working with on a production team and I found out there are some  good directors, some mellow directors and some directors that will rip off their own heads and chuck it at you when you don’t do what they want. The fun thing was I got my first exposure to job creep, running camera and tape decks (I said it was the 90’s,) laying lots of cable, building and striking sets, learning proper microphone techniques and editing location pieces on an ancient NewTek Video Flyer non-linear editor (that had a whopping 16 megs of RAM and two 4 GB hard drives that could hold an hour of video. I also directed one of the worst Christmas videos ever – A Prozac Christmas, which while on YouTube now, makes me cringe to even think about, even more so then the mullet I had. At least in the picture here I’m wearing my favorite hockey jersey from the Tacoma Rockets (and I still have it.)

In 1995 the Spud Goodman show was canceled from KTZZ and after sending out some demos was picked up by FOX, first for 12 episodes on their Cable Channel “The Set” that never really got off the ground, but later on another channel called FOX NET that hit about 120 markets around the world. While on FOX I took over as the editor of the show and produced 56 episodes while also directing most of the live music guests who included Peter Buck, Robyn Hitchcock, Richard Thompson, Ben Lee, They Might Be Giants, Semisonic, Alejandro Escovedo, Rosanne Cash, Graham Parker and John Doe to name a nice even 10. One of the highlights was filming an interview Spud had with Julia Child and after it was over she gave me a cookie. Yes, I ate it. Duh.

In the late spring of 1998 The Spud Goodman Show got canceled, as all shows do eventually. During this same time I was teaching two video production classes a day at a local high school since cable TV, even working for FOX, didn’t pay enough back then to quit my day job. In the summer of 1998 a job to run the Digital Design department at Pierce College got posted. I interviewed using plastic overlays on an overhead projector and a demo reel on VHS and somehow got the gig that started the next twenty years of teaching web development, animation and lots of design. Teaching at a college has a good level of freedom and I, with my Spud Goodman friends, managed to create a series of shorts for local cable called Tacoma Diaries that starred the very talented Tim Hoban. That eight year journey spawned over 70 shorts and somehow I got roped into acting as well as editing. I actually like two or three of them.

While I love video production, building websites and making music, teaching has always been a passion of mine and I don’t suck at it like I do as an actor. I’m just doing it now online at SkillShare and occasionally YouTube. Over the years when asked what I do, I tell people “I get paid to show students how to blow shit up.” You can and should take that a variety of ways.